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were found on the periphery wearing old-fashioned full-length overcoats, cloaks, and caftans. I especially recall the street vendors selling juicy and tasty plums. The vendors wore white aprons and carried their trays on their heads. Near Haymarket Square and Apraksin Market there were many merchants’ wives in colorful old-style broad capes and shawls typical of their social class. I managed to discern all this much later. My first task was to find my way to the Pavlov Military Academy.
The academy turned out to be located in the boonies of St. Pete and was totally different from the Alexander Academy in Moscow. It was a gloomy, gray barracks and not even ancient. Inside, it did not have the expected high-ceilinged halls and its corridors and rooms were low as well. It smelled of wax which was used to robustly polish the parquet floors which were the sole decoration of the place.
My first impression of the cadet corps was negative as well. What had I gotten into? Would I ever come to like this place? My thoughts flew homeward to my friends, Voznesenskii Street, and my parents who were left all alone.
The severe military training of the academy after my independent trip to Switzerland and after my unfettered life in our Tbilisi was hard. I was very homesick. There was the friendship with the contingent from our old school. There were some twenty of us here, if you counted all the classes. Meleshko, Boreisha, and Sasko were Tbilisi alums who were in His Majesty’s Company because of their height. The Tbilisi contingent, just as all the other cadet schools, had their own table in the tea hall. We would gather there as at a club during the intermission between day and evening classes to talk of our affairs and recall Tbilisi. Prices in the tea hall were low, but if there was no money for rolls we simply drank tea with sugar.
At tea we gave each other friendly advice and shared information about the city: which horse cars or trolleys to take when you had a pass. We talked of our instructors and company commanders, but the most valuable were our shared memories of Tbilisi which kept up our spirits. Whenever someone received delicacies from home he, of course, shared them with the rest. A Siberian fellow named Makeev attached himself to our group. We immediately took him in and gave him the nickname of “walrus,” which is what we kintos called all Siberians. [Kinto, meaning comic street entertainer/musician, was widely used in the Caucasus as a term either of endearment or mockery.] Homesickness for our distant lands brought us together. We would walk around the academy quadrangle and talk of the past and the future. The present, the barracks present, would go by very quickly. And, in fact, it did not just go by, it flew.
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Chapter Four
One brutally cold day of minus fourteen degrees or so, [five degrees Fahrenheit] the whole academy went to the funeral of General Rikachev, a one-time commandant of the academy. We marched along crowded streets with passersby carefully examining us. What did they think of us, future officers? Were they in sympathy or in opposition along with the majority of the “intelligentsia?” There was music, then a rifle salute. This was all new to us and we felt ourselves to be adults. Our fingers nearly froze and our shoulders and arms were extremely tired. But as always, fatigue provided satisfaction.
There was a momentous event at the Feast of the Epiphany. His Majesty’s Company took part in a religious procession at the Winter Palace, and we saw, for the first time, the Sovereign Emperor and the Autocrat of all the Russias.
There were ceremonial halls—magnificent paintings on the walls, chandeliers, vases. And amidst this luxury we stood erect in two ranks looking with surprise and delight at generals, the Emperor’s suite, the rare, exalted medals, liveried servants, courtiers, grandees, officers of the cavalry guards, hussars in their red dolmans, and Pavlov grenadiers in their tall shakos. We who had just left provincial Tbilisi, or Omsk, or Orenburg were astounded. What brilliance, what opulence.
Then the solemn religious procession began, moving through all the halls to the Jordan doors and out to the Neva River, the Jordan.1
And here is his Majesty the Emperor whom I longed to see. He is the epitome of modesty and simplicity, despite the glittering surroundings and haughtiness of the courtiers. His sky-blue eyes are plain, tender and familiar as if they were the eyes of thousands and thousands of Russian people. There is something very Russian, something dear in them and, strange as it may seem, something attractively shy. And his rank is only that of a colonel, something immediately apparent amidst hundreds of high-ranking generals. The thought flashes through my mind that he ought to be a general rather than a colonel. But it is also pleasing that he modestly declines higher ranks. But will this be understood, perchance, by the giants in the Preobrazhenskii Regiment who stretch like a wall down the corridors. But what thoughts don’t enter the mind of a provincial youth at his first time at court. The chief thing is to prolong time and to gaze at him intensely. His Majesty walks by slowly and looks kindly and attentively into the eyes of each. And his gaze stopped at me for a moment and filled me with pride, as if I had become known to the tsar.
The empress walked next to him, slowly nodding to everyone with a benevolent and intelligent expression. . . .
Overall, the impression was magical and overwhelming, and later in the tea hall, answering everyone’s questions, I spoke with enthusiasm of the court, parade, and of His Majesty. . . .
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The next time we saw the emperor was when he came to inspect the academy. There was only one adjutant with him, but he kept to himself, and we all felt as if His Majesty was our personal guest. Nor did the academy administration surround the emperor except for general Shatilov, who, out of breath with joy, pranced behind the emperor trying to explain everything with his hissing, flu-ridden voice.
The emperor was obviously pleased with everything and perhaps most of all with the fact that he was out of his usual environment and in touch with Russia’s youth which had just come from all corners of his extensive empire. Who knows, but perhaps we from Siberia, the Urals, the Caucasus, Pskov province brought with us the air of all the Russian borderlands and His Majesty unexpectedly became immersed in our youthful high spirits and sensed that very connectedness with the people which he so needed.
This was the time of the greatest flowering of our Russian state. There were Russian troops at far-off Kushka and even farther in immense Manchuria. His Majesty was the most powerful monarch in the world. Yet, here he was with us and we could see him up close and examine all the features of his Preo-brazhenskii Regiment tunic and the historic adjutant’s epaulets with the interwoven silver monograms of Alexander II and Alexander III, his grandfather and father. A gilded adjutant’s braid ran down his sleeve from an epaulet. He approached us with tenderness, occasionally posing brief questions. At the doors, where everyone rushed to see him off, His Majesty put on his gray overcoat, wiggling a shoulder as if the coat was tight in the armpit, and said that he was glad to have seen our academy in such exemplary order and that he wished us success in our studies and training.
We were given silent consent to go out onto Spasskii Street and run alongside the emperor’s conveyance. We shouted Hurrah! Then the driver went faster and the sleigh disappeared in the mists of St. Petersburg.
Classes were canceled for the rest of the day and that made us doubly happy.
NOTE
1. In the Eastern Orthodox Church Epiphany celebrates the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist in the river Jordan. The ceremony, which includes a blessing of the waters (hence the exit to the Neva River), occurs on the twelfth day of Christmas.
Chapter Five
Aleksandra Tyrkova-Williams, A Woman’s Autonomy
Tyrkova-Williams’s memoirs provide an indication of the mindset of idealistic (and frequently revolutionary) Russian youth. The author was much influenced by her mother who, she says, was a person of the 1860’s—one who obtained her liberal views from Christian ethics and from broad reading. Her
grandfather’s copy of Lamartine’s work on the Girondists was also very influential. She read it several times when she was thirteen. The poetry of Nekrasov found even more resonance in the young Aleksandra. The events of the day, disputations, political literature, and the arrest and exile of her brother to Siberia made certain that her path would become an oppositional one. Ultimately her own high sense of morality and justice made her turn away from what the Revolution spawned. Taken from Aleksandra Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode [On the Paths toward Freedom]. New York: Izd. Imeni Chekhova, 1952.
I am not writing a history. I do not have any books, or documents at hand, not even the notes which I occasionally jotted down. This is merely a remembrance, a story of what I saw and heard, of the setting in which I grew and lived. I write only of that which has remained in my memory. I began writing at the end of 1940 in Pau, a small town in the south of France with a beautiful view of the Pyrenees. Currently, I am writing in Grenoble with no less a gorgeous view of the Alps. Where will I end? Will I be able to complete this? Who knows? At the age of 73, one looks at tomorrow carefully, especially now, in 1943. But I will try to preserve in human memory that which I witnessed, sometimes as a participant, and relay the development and spirit of the events over which future historians will puzzle. Unless history, publishing, libraries, and archives, the building blocks of culture, are swept away by storms.
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I have chosen to write my memoirs because I think it essential to retain a remembrance of our era which concluded a specific period of Russian life, perhaps not even just the Russian. I will try to speak less of myself, though I do so. I was a part, even though small one, of that oppositional ferment which was called the liberation movement. Now after all that Europe is going through, and all that Russia is suffering, I have different perceptions regarding that which occurred and the events in which I participated in one way or another. Our weaknesses, errors, and delusions have become clearer. But I do not disavow my past and those ideals which I served as well as I could— human rights, freedom, humaneness, and respect for the individual. I bitterly regret that our generation was unable to translate them into life, could not effect in Russia the free and democratic order for which we strove. Catherine II once said that she set the well being of each and everyone as her goal. There is much wisdom in these words. The term “each and everyone” denoted Russia to her. We transferred the center of gravity onto the person, each individual, forgetting the dictum of another great sovereign, Peter I: If Russia were only to live . . . We forgot this, not that we wanted Russia’s destruction, but because of a childish, unthinking confidence in its stability.
The basis of our concern was a striving for universal well being, not for our personal bliss or enrichment, as was frequently the case with European politicians. Therefore, in the Russian opposition, there was much that was immature, naïve, unreasoned and, what turned out to be most dangerous, much simple-mindedness about the nature of statecraft.
The more that I recall the past, the more surprised I am to observe that the European calamity and collapse of today is a continuum of what we Russians thought and acted on a half century ago. If at the end of the last century, and at the beginning of this one, the more active, determined, and ardent segment of Russian public opinion had not been blind to Russian reality and not possessed by the passion of protest, there would not have been two European wars or Asian unrest. I would be peacefully writing my memoirs at home in Russia, and not in an alien land. But things turned out otherwise.
That which we considered to be our Russian cause, our Russian struggle for a new life, was transformed into the preface which awaited Europe and which was reflected in the life of people on all the five continents. That of which I write became a part of their history. Marxism, which now has such an enormous influence on the world’s politics, became a real force thanks to the Russian Revolution, even though in the beginning it was only one of its components. It began on 14 December 1825. From that time on, revolutionary sparks either smoldered or flared in agitated minds until, in the XX century, they raced across all of Russia, and then the whole world, like fire in the steppe.
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Chapter Five
The underground revolutionary fervor was reflected in the lives of all thinking people, including those who fanned the flames and those who attempted to douse them. The flashes of this flame were reflected in everything that I had read, seen, thought, heard, and felt since my youth. In order to understand the Russian reality of the past one hundred years, one must be cognizant of this incessant, inflamed, irrepressible and rebellious agitation. It grew and strengthened until 1917, when it burst out in a crushing revolution, a fearful historical collapse, which initially destroyed the life of the cultured classes, and later shattered the life patterns of the peasants.
As for myself, the escalation of revolutionary rhythm coincided with a radical change in my personal life. It came to be that I had to support my children and myself. I was unprepared for this and did not envision the difficulties which life often presented to novices. I had no profession. Luckily, I seized onto journalism and made writing my craft. I serve it to this day. Later, this drew me closer to the active opposition. But, at the beginning, I felt myself very alone on the new road, the more so that I did not yet perceive social missions to pursue. In actuality, the clarification of these was just coming to the attention of public opinion. There were no beacons by which I could steer the course. This was practically the most difficult thing for me.
The only thing I recognized clearly was my responsibility for the children. I took them when I separated from my husband. One way or another, this had to be addressed. During the summers, I took the children to my mother in the country, and spent more time there than in the city. On the Vergezh River I was again immersed in my mother’s warm and radiant life which merged with the beauty of our native country spaces. When school began again in the fall, my children and I returned to St. Petersburg. We lived in a small, cheap apartment in the Peski district. Living was cheap and similar to what I, as a gim-nazium student, had seen in the life of my close friend Nadia Krupskaia [later to become Lenin’s wife]. At that time I had wondered how she and her mother managed in such cramped quarters. Now I was forced to understand. Even for this kind of life there frequently was not enough money. There was almost no work to be had. I tore my children away from a secure life, but what was I giving them in compensation?
Having no money weighed heavily on me. I did not know how to push my way through life, to move ahead. I was acquainted with some writers. It was pleasant to be with them, and conversation was cheery. But none of them ever had the thought of helping me find work. Perhaps the fact that I was a landowner’s daughter gave the illusion of material well being. The dresses which I had once bought in Paris, and which I somehow sewed up and wore down, also gave me the appearance of being wealthier than I was. My
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provocative and independent manner could also be deceptive—my ability to carry myself above my station.
The owner of Mir Bozhii, A.A. Davydova, with whose daughter I was great friends, once offered me a translation of a French book on the encyclopedists. This was then published as a supplement to Mir Bozhii. This gave me a breathing spell. Translating was not that easy for me. But newspaper work was immediately appealing. At that time, there were very few newspapers being published in Petersburg and I had no entry to them. I began by working for the provincial press, in the Iaroslavl newspaper called Severnyi Krai. There I sent my Petersburg Letters. It was easy to write them, even too easy and carefree. After a rather lengthy period of writing and social work, I took a look at my first satirical articles. I came upon the article on the Peredvizh-niki [realist painters, second half of 19th century] and was terrified. So much superficial bravado and so little knowledge and understanding
! True, at that time, in the writing on art, the creative process was not analyzed. The content and the thematics held sway. This was the narrow path that I treaded as well.
My relationship with Severnyi Krai became instantly fraternal and colle-gial, at first via correspondence. But the newspaper was poor. They could not afford to pay me more than three kopeks per line, and late at that. I would write for them once a week, some 300–400 lines. In the best case scenario, I would earn forty rubles a month. My apartment rent was thirty-five rubles. I also received several hundred rubles a year from a small brick factory that had been built on land rented from my father. The summer months on the Vergezh did not cost me anything. Nevertheless, it was sometimes so difficult to maintain myself and my children that I was periodically at a loss.
My affairs started to improve when I commenced writing for a second provincial newspaper, Pridneprovskii Krai, published in Ekaterinoslav. But my prosperity did not last long. A situation occurred which was characteristic of the position of the press and the mood of journalists. Pridneprovskii Krai was larger and incomparably wealthier than the Iaroslavl newspaper. I knew no one in the editorial office. But they liked my articles, embraced me right away, and asked me to write more. I wrote them of everything that came to mind—theater, books, news of life abroad and foreign literature. My first stories were published in Pridneprovskii Krai. I did not, of course, touch on political themes. The censor’s office did not allow them. But no matter what we wrote about, the authorities sensed an obstinate oppositional spirit in our words and in those things which we passed over in silence. And they were right. But we were not at fault either for feeling constricted, for outgrowing the enclosures into which the government stubbornly forced Russian thought. The government did not wish to, did not know how to, provide an outlet for
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