Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

“The scarcity of food had preyed on the Empress’s mind for many months, and one of the last conversations she ever had with Rasputin was on that subject. The winter of 1916 set in early, and the snows were so deep that transportation of all kinds of things, food included, was greatly impeded. I remember that the Empress said to Rasputin that nature itself seemed to be conspiring against poor Russia that year.

“The rioting in Petrograd increased, and even in my bed I could hear echoes of it around the palace. Shots I heard and horrid yells. I tried to get out of bed, but the Empress soothed me. ‘It is bad, of course,’ she said, ‘but it will quiet soon. The poor people are mad with hunger. They will be given food and then all this will be over.’ Soon the palace guards, the regiments on duty in Tsarskoe Selo, began to show signs of demoralization. They were afraid for their own lives, and you cannot wonder that they were. The Empress used to go out in the cold and snow in the dead of night and talk to the men, reassure them, comfort them. ‘Nothing will happen,’ she told them. But for her I believe the last man would have thrown away his gun and fled. Her will and her resolution alone kept them at their posts.”

“Do you think that the Empress really believed that it was a riot and not a revolution?” I asked. It was history this woman was telling me, history that will live in libraries a thousand years after we two, and all of us, are dust. I wanted to know the exact truth.

“I am sure she did,” said Mme. Virubova. “If she had dreamed that it was a revolution she would have sent earlier for the Emperor, who, you know, was at the front with his army. She was alone and she faced the trouble alone, but if she had known the full extent of the trouble she would have wanted the Emperor where he would be safer than out there among that murderous gang. She did not know that Russia was in revolution, nor would she believe it at first when she was told that the army had gone over to the revolutionists. The officers of the guard told her, but she simply shook her head. Finally, Grand Duke Paul came tearing out to Tsarskoe in his highest power motor car. He convinced her that it was true. Even then her steel nerves endured. ‘Send for the Emperor,’ she said calmly and sternly. ‘I am going back to my sick children.’ And she went.”

The iron nerve displayed by the Empress of Russia when she learned that supreme disaster had befallen the house of Romanoff was in contrast to the emotion which overcame the deposed Emperor on his return to Tsarskoe Selo. At the time of his abdication, near the army front, he had behaved with dignity and self-command. He scornfully refused the whispered suggestion of one general that he escape in one of the high-power motor cars which always accompanied the imperial train. If the people wanted him to abdicate, he was ready to do so, and ready also to place himself at their disposal. Nicholas also showed himself to be a good Russian and no tool of the pro-German party, if reports are correct. When the news came that the army had gone over to the revolution some one near the Emperor, it is said, told him that there was one desperate way to avert the catastrophe. He could open up the Dvinsk front, let the enemy in, and thus by the sacrifice of his country save his dynasty. Nicholas refused even to consider such a crime. He committed many sins of cruelty in his time, and many more sins of stupidity. But in the end he showed himself no traitor. His return to Tsarskoe Selo was intended by Kerensky and the other members of the provisional government to be in accordance with his former rank, and orders were given to treat him with all respect and consideration. These orders, if Mme. Virubova is to be believed, were disregarded by the soldiers on guard at the Alexander palace, the home of the royal family.

In my last talk with Mme. Virubova she spoke with deep feeling of the rowdy reception given the returning Nicholas. “They blew tobacco smoke in his face, the brutes!” she said. “A soldier grabbed him by the arm and pulled one way, while others clutched him on the other side and pulled him in an opposite direction. They jeered at him and laughed at his anger and pain. When he was finally alone with his family and intimate friends he could not contain his grief but wept unrestrainedly. We all wept, for that matter: we who loved him.”

It is to the credit of Kerensky and the ministers that they never would consent to any suggestion that Nicholas be thrown into a dungeon or otherwise harshly treated. As long as the family remained at Tsarskoe Selo, which was until the 1st of August, Russian style, and August 13 in the western calendar, it lived in its accustomed manner. The servants, most of them, remained at their posts, and while no member of the family was allowed to leave the palace grounds on any pretext, nor the palace itself except when accompanied by armed guards, they had the freedom of their home and the society of a few friends. They were not allowed to telephone, and all letters reaching them had first to be read by the officer in command of the guards. Mme. Virubova told me that in spite of Kerensky’s good intentions, the deposed royalties were subjected to a number of petty annoyances which must have caused them all the resentment and humiliation their tormentors intended. The electric lights were sometimes turned off early in the evening, leaving the palace in darkness. There were days when the water was turned off and the family was deprived of bathing facilities. The soldiers on guard were not infrequently rude and churlish and openly exultant in the presence of their prisoners.

Kerensky cannot be held responsible for these things, but he was responsible for depriving the former Empress of the society of her most intimate friend, Mme. Virubova. I have already told how she was arrested while still suffering from the effects of measles and thrown into a cell in Peter and Paul. The cell was damp and insanitary, and the sick woman suffered extreme misery all the time she was there. Surrounded constantly by soldiers, who watched her night and day, she was never alone even long enough to dress or to bathe. She is lame, as I have stated, and once she fell on the slippery floor of her cell and was unable for a long time to rise. The soldiers on guard refused to help her, but simply stood and laughed at her efforts to reach her bed. “Twice during the months of my confinement they let my mother visit me,” she told me. “But I was allowed to talk to her only in presence of the guard and across a wide table in the governor’s room.”

A friend of Mme. Virubova told me a still worse story concerning her imprisonment. Several times her father was visited by soldiers from Peter and Paul and made to pay large sums of money in order to insure his daughter from the most horrible indignities at the hands of the men who guarded her. He paid this blackmail. He had to. There was no power in Russia to appeal to, and Kerensky himself could not have prevented the murder or outrage of that lame and helpless woman in the fortress of Peter and Paul. She escaped the last insult men are capable of offering to women, and the government, after vainly trying to fasten the crime of treason on her, set Anna Virubova free under military surveillance. But they would not grant the Empress’s plea to send her friend back to Tsarskoe Selo.

The first shock of dumbfounded amazement over, the royal family, which had never believed that it could be overthrown, regained its composure and accepted its destiny with quiet resignation. The Emperor became his adored son’s tutor, and the Empress her daughters’ constant companion. When spring came the whole family went out and made a garden. The hundreds of soldiers in Tsarskoe and thousands of people from Petrograd made pilgrimages to the palace grounds and watched through the high iron fence the former Czar spading up the ground and the former heir and his sisters planting and hoeing potatoes. The former Empress, in a wheeled chair or low pony carriage, for she was in feeble health, usually looked on smilingly.