The Russian Album (12 page)

Paul's brother Vladimir joined the Russian fleet which set sail from the Baltic to travel around the world to engage the Japanese in the waters off China. In letters mailed from the coastal coaling stations, which found their way to the fastness of the Ukraine, the family followed the fleet's progress down the African coast, around the Horn, across the Indian Ocean to its fateful meeting with the Japanese. For Vladimir's mother each letter was a torment: Vladimir was her youngest, the one who had always known how to reach her armoured heart. Each letter became gloomier as the fatal engagement approached: the ships were old, they manoeuvred poorly, the crews were exhausted.

At the dockside in Vladivostok, one July day in 1905, Katia and the nurses from the marine hospital were told to await the Russian fleet's arrival. All day Katia scanned the grey horizon for ships' funnels, for the wisps of smoke which would herald her brother's safe passage through the fire. At dusk she knew there would be no ships. The horizon was empty. The Japanese had destroyed the Russian fleet in the battle of Tsushima. Vladimir, chief officer on the admiral's flagship, went down with his ship. His last letters, full of the strained cheerfulness of a child keeping his courage up, arrived at Kroupodernitsa after the news of his death. Outside the church in Kroupodernitsa, the family raised a monument to him, a cross on a plinth of basalt, with a ship's anchor at the base. It is still there, at the edge of wheat fields, 500 miles from the sea. At the end of August, Paul and Natasha's second child was born in Kiev, and they named him Vladimir. At his christening Paul placed the infant in his mother's arms and said to her, ‘Here is your new Vladimir.'

A month later, in early September 1905, Natasha was back in Kiev in the apartment on Levashkovskaya street, with little Vladimir in her arms and Nicholas, then a year and a half old, at her feet, when she saw from the upstairs window a strange procession slowly approaching up the street. They were poor people mostly, marching in rows, singing hymns, carrying icons and ‘hideous cheap reproductions of the Tsar'. She sent her valet down to see what was happening. Someone in the crowd told him to get inside. Then the rocks began to fly through the air and the glass in the house opposite belonging to a Jewish merchant started breaking. It seemed fantastic and surreal, this sudden irruption of riot into the little frame of Natasha's existence. As the glass crashed in the street below her and looters began climbing in through the shattered windows, the crowd sang hymns Natasha had known from childhood. Nicholas stood with his nose to the window and shouted ‘Hurrah!' In a corner of the nursery away from the windows sat the boys' old nurse, rocking to and fro, her lips soundlessly whispering a prayer.

Someone went down and remonstrated with the crowd, saying it was unchristian to destroy people's property. Natasha held her children tight, watching the scene. She was safe, perched just above the storm. Someone in the crowd daubed a white cross on the gate of their house. They would be spared. Slowly and methodically, the procession moved down the street to the next Jewish house. While some smashed the windows with stones and others leaped in to begin looting, the rest stood outside and sang hymns. The police did not arrive until it was all over. After the last of the procession had gone, Natasha's valet told her that the Jewish woman who lived opposite had come to the door and begged that they shelter her children from the crowd. The woman could hear the procession coming up the street. She was desperate. The valet refused to let them in without Count Ignatieff's orders and he was at work. She appealed to Natasha's landlady. ‘My babies have scarlet fever, hide them,' she pleaded. In that case, the landlady said, she could not admit children suffering from scarlet fever. There were other children in the house to think of. The mother and her children managed to flee into town as the crowd began pitching stones at her house.

Paul returned home breathless late that night. A crowd had burst into his office at the
zemstvo,
pulled out the telephones and demanded that all the
zemstvo
workers join the general strike. Paul refused to negotiate with a crowd, but offered to talk to three of their leaders. A peasant member of the
zemstvo
board began arguing with one of the student leaders of the crowd. ‘You are Jewish, you have no right to represent Russians,' the peasant shouted. The meeting was in uproar. Then shouts were heard from the crowd: bearing down on them in the street were five Cossacks, standing up in their stirrups, whips poised to strike. Paul opened a back door and let the crowd's leaders vanish down a side street.

The city was ablaze with anti-Semitic rumour. A Jewish lawyer named Ratner was supposed to have raced down the main street of the city, the Krestchatik, on a white charger, shouting, ‘We gave you the Saviour; now we will give you a new Tsar.' That night Paul and Natasha's maid served dinner wearing a new wristwatch. She had picked it up from among the shattered glass and gashed awnings of the Jewish jewellers on the Krestchatik. In the countryside, revolutionary bandits were burning cooperatives and factories and holding up banks. Peasants were seizing the lands of absentee landlords. A peasant delegation came to meet the
zemstvo
board, and Paul always remembered how one of them told a grim little parable. ‘When food is abundant in the summer, the worker bees are satisfied to feed the queen bee and the drones, but when autumn comes and food gets scarce, what happens to the drones?' In the silence, the peasant snapped his fingers ominously and said, ‘Out they go.'

Natasha watched the revolution of 1905 unfolding with angry disbelief. ‘Things were just left unchecked at the beginning,' she wrote later. ‘From the throne on down, there was always the same total lack of strength, power and organization: things just floating away at their own, drifting away hopelessly.'

In January 1906, Paul's uncle Alexis was named governor of Tver province. He had a reputation for reaction and for severity with political prisoners dating back to his days as governor of Western Siberia. Soon after his arrival to take up his post in Tver, he walked into a university reception and was stopped by a student who approached for a few words. The student pulled out a revolver and shot Alexis dead at point-blank range. When arrested the student was found to have connections both with the Socialist Revolutionaries and with the secret police.

It was at this moment – in a city torn by riot and pogrom, in a country lurching on the edge of a precipice – that Paul was appointed governor of the province of Kiev, a territory the size of Great Britain. At first, Natasha was loath to leave the little flat on Levashkovskaya for the governor's mansion, with its formal and cheerless rooms filled with busts of the Tsar. And at first, the times were frightening: plots, rumours of plots, coaches following behind their own at night when they returned from the theatre, threatening letters arriving with the morning mail, obscene and vicious notes which she would drop on to the silver tray as if she had been scalded.

Later, they were happy in the governor's house, now ringing with the sound of three little boys, Nicholas, Vladimir and Alec, and a baby Paul. Downstairs, outside the governor's study, the courier Abraham, who looked like an old black crow, would screen the petitioners lining up outside the door, while Natasha worked in a study of her own with her friend Madame Zabougina organizing charity bazaars and fêtes on behalf of the local hospitals and orphanages. She felt happiest when Paul was in the house, when they seemed to be working side by side. At nights they would sometimes go to the opera house in Kiev, and she remembered that she once saw Sarah Bernhardt and once heard the great Russian singer Chaliapin. There were cruises on the Dnieper in the yachts of millionaires, nights under the stars in their fragrant garden; there was time for each other.

Paul had been chosen as a man with a local, liberal reputation to bring peace to the city, and so he did. An old monk who had been stirring up anti-Semitic hatred with his Sunday sermons was brought into his office and told to cease preaching that the Jews had crucified Jesus. The head of the local right-wing vigilantes, the Black Hundreds, was told that he would be held personally responsible if another Jewish shop was attacked. The police commander was told to patrol the Jewish section of the city in person and to instruct his men that they faced instant dismissal if they failed to put down attacks on Jewish homes and businesses.

When students at Kiev University occupied the buildings, Paul ordered his cavalry to surround the lecture halls to persuade them to come out peacefully and then march them all off to the armoury for a hot meal and a bed. The non-student revolutionaries were identified and prosecuted; the students returned to class. When a Polish landowner's son wounded a peasant girl on a shooting expedition and her village responded by burning down the landowner's house, Paul despatched a squadron of Cossacks to arrest the landowner's son and to force the village to deliver up the arsonists. When a revolutionary gang robbed a sugar-beet factory, killing two night watchmen, his police pursued the men to Odessa, arrested them and secured their conviction. They escaped his death sentence by taking poison in the cells.

As civilian governor Paul had the power to ban any demonstrations and break up any meetings he considered a threat to the public peace. He could even shut down the
zemstvo
he himself had led and his police could try offenders before military courts martial, rather than by regular civilian procedure. Only the Okhrana, the secret police, fell outside his control. They compiled files on him and his staff and reported directly to the Ministry of the Interior in Petersburg. As a liberal who admired British constitutional monarchy, Paul disapproved of his own arbitrary powers. But where were these powers set out? In the Extraordinary and Temporary Measures of November 1881. And who had been their draftsman? His own father.

Paul could not have been unaware of this irony, but he passed it over in dutiful silence, as he passed over his father's anti-Semitism. How was it between them at the end, the liberal son who believed in guiding Russia slowly towards a constitutional monarchy and the father who had known only the high noon of autocracy? Did they ever broach their differences, when Paul came down from Kiev to Kroupodernitsa to visit his father, when he held the old man's arm as they walked along the avenue of chestnut trees and sat on the benches there? There was the fault line of their different temperaments: tempestuous old adventurer, cautious earnest son; there was the fault line of the times, the father baffled by revolution, the son trying to navigate in the storm. And there was the fault line of their age, a son coming into his own at last, watching with mingled contempt and pity the rheumy decrepitude of a man whose shadow had loomed over his life so long. The silence was full between them as they sat side by side, father and son, on the sunlit bench.

The father's final years were grim: he had lost his youngest son to the sea in the battle of Tsushima in 1905 and he had lost his brother to an assassin's bullet in 1906. In 1908 his own time finally came. Paul buried his father in the family crypt beneath the village church in Kroupodernitsa; he ordered a black basalt monument on which were inscribed his father's name and rank, his dates, 1832–1908, and just the two names for his epitaph: Peking and San Stefano. He had lived too long and it had all slipped through his fingers, and when they buried him, in the village church, there was only the family to mourn him, led by his dry-eyed son.

No sooner had the body been laid to rest than the creditors began to descend. Grinevetsky, the swindling steward, shot himself on hearing of the old Count's death, and a crazy scheme of speculation which Grinevetsky had spun in the shelter of the old Count's name came tumbling out of locked cupboards and bank safes. With the governor's salary, his wife's dowry and the income from his estate, Paul silently set out to restore the family fortunes from the ruins. It took a decade.

However tawdry the actual inheritance, Paul always insisted that he had shouldered his father's legacy and traditions of service. He revered his father as an Asian empire-builder and triumphant diplomatist of the Turkish war and consigned to silence his fateful year as the anti-Semitic Minister of the Interior. When close friends like Vladimir Nabokov disposed of their court uniforms in protest at the unpunished pogroms of Kishinev and plunged into party politics, Paul could not follow them. Party politics was anathema to him, a betrayal of the oath of service he had given to the Tsar personally when serving in the Preobrajensky regiment during his military service. No matter that his father had been destroyed by service to the Tsar, no matter that the regime of Nicholas II was increasingly unpalatable to liberals of his generation, Paul's life had meaning only within the terms of fidelity to his family's traditions of service. His life became a tortuous attempt to salvage what was honourable from what was reactionary in these traditions, to sustain their integrity at a historical moment which was breaking their meanings apart. While liberals of his generation chose to distance themselves from a regime ever more at odds with its own society, Paul chose to follow a path which took him to its very heart.

Through his work as governor of Kiev province, Paul had come to the attention of the Stolypin government in Petersburg, in particular to the attention of Krivoshein, the Minister of Agriculture, who invited the young governor to become head of the agriculture department in his ministry. It was a fateful move to the centre for someone who prided himself on being a man with soil on his boots, someone who kept his distance from the vortex of Petersburg intrigue. Natasha hated the idea, wanted to stay in her cosy Kiev and worried how she would manage in the cold and exalted Petersburg social atmosphere. But in the winter of 1908–09 the family moved to Petersburg, to a dark and narrow flat on Galernaya street just behind the quays near the Admiralty.