The Castle in the Forest

  Indeed, it was Nicky who decided to hold the Peasants’ Festival in the same place again. He wished to initiate a new tradition. “From what you tell me,” he told his ministers, “we need more traditions.”

  One problem that was not examined, however, was the field. In 1891, a large exhibition had been held on its ground. Temporary construction had been thrown up, but no funds were available afterward for filling the excavations. This immense field was now scarred with sand pits, small gulches, uncapped wells, and abandoned foundations. Broad paths had been laid out to skirt these hindrances and it had been assumed that people would move prudently. There was, after all, enough level space for half a million visitors.

  In truth, there had been more immediate concerns than Khodynskoe Field. The multitudes who were coming to Moscow had to be sheltered. Some peasants might have family members who worked in factories, and so could stay in their lodgings. The grease of sheepskin jackets and sweat-ridden capes, caftans, and black woolen coats would hardly be unfamiliar odors. And, of course, there were the railroad stations. They certainly did serve as housing. What was not anticipated, however, was the great number of peasants who decided to arrive at the field on the night before. By evening, multitudes were already encamped. There was drinking, there was singing, there were bonfires. Balalaikas were played. Through the city, word had gone out. Gifts would be distributed early. We had disseminated that rumor. Yes, the best stuff would go first. Thousands of peasants moved up, therefore, and started pressing on the wooden barriers that shielded the huts and kiosks and counters housing the gifts. Others began to push forward from behind. Then, hours in advance of first morning light, the working populace of Moscow started to arrive. The slums were marching in. They, too, had heard the rumor.

  On this night of the seventeenth, a gala also took place at the Bolshoi Theater. Many ladies were wearing their diamonds, so many that the glow of the gems—as a good number remarked—might be ready to compete with the footlights. Yet most of the gentry were talking about the field. It was said that by late morning one million souls would throng to Khodynskoe. One million souls! “Yes,” was the word at the Bolshoi, “never before have so many of the common people been ready to offer their reverence to the Tsar.”

  That was said at the gala. At the field, there was a most uneasy restlessness. Some peasants began rocking the posts that supported the barriers. “The good stuff is gone,” our agents were there to say. “The mugs are gone. The beer is gone.” “No,” went a counter-rumor, “the beer is not gone, but there is little left.” The barriers began to tilt. When the first one fell, the kiosks were at once overrun. But even as some were reaching for gifts, they were knocked down by throngs pushing up from the rear. Thousands jammed into the thousands already up front. A man had no more than to stumble and another would trip over him. A third would crash, a fourth was stunned. More bodies pushed forward. Women screamed. Children wailed. Masses of men, women, and children were now being driven pell-mell into the largest of the sand pits, and there they thrashed about in a hurly-burly at the bottom, searching for a grip on someone else’s body by which to climb out of the pit even as others fell over them. Suffocations commenced. I had never heard such woe. Thousands of throats were roaring with rage. As many others were shrieking in terror. Smaller men and women were thrown upward like spray. Children moaned under the weight of boots clambering over them. The sounds were unearthly. Who was to count how many hundreds of heels were grinding down now upon hundreds of torsos? Or noses. Or eyes, or teeth. A few even escaped. Some! A few children were lifted and passed backward overhead. Adults able to reach the edge of the crowd collapsed like minnows in the shallows, not able to breathe nor stir, then able to breathe, or just about. Others were braying out the names of family members. Faces were already petrified by grief.

  Yet, in the manner that a storm dies down, it came to an end. Those who had broken through to the booths and trampled over the kiosks were forced to keep moving forward by the ongoing pressure of those behind—until finally they reached one end of the field. Others squeezed their way off to the side. Some in the rear, hearing screams ahead, drew back and pushed no longer. As the frenzy abated, people moved off in four directions. The dead lay in the pits and on the flats.

  In these early hours of daylight while some of the fallen were still quivering, disorder spread to the streets of Moscow. Tens of thousands of Muscovites who had been planning to be present at the official opening later that morning had chosen to leave homes at an early hour to avoid the crowds. Now, as they approached on foot, wagons were coming toward them, and these bloody wagons were accompanied by men and women wailing in grief. Some were hysterical. They would laugh for one moment, groan at the next. Not knowing whether to consider themselves blessed for having escaped, they also had to fear they were in peril of losing their souls. So many felt an unholy readiness to laugh. How could they not, when the smallest part of them had secretly despised the dead relative for years?

  Those who were still coming toward Khodynskoe had to be bewildered by all the screaming faces coming toward them from the field. Every wagon carried bodies clothed in various stages of ruined peasant finery. Many of the dead still lay on the field with shattered noses, bloody faces, broken limbs, cockeyed jaws, twisted bodies near to nude. On the wagons, more than a few had been covered over in the remnants and rags of other people’s clothes, torn from one corpse to protect the dead modesty of another.

  Later came estimates of the number of lives that had been lost. At first, Nicky was told that the number was three hundred, but that minister was well known for reducing bad news by 90 percent. Later, Nicky was told that it all came to thirteen hundred people. The final toll was three thousand. He could hardly have an idea of the count. The first impulse following the arrival of higher police officials was to get the bodies off the field before the Tsar arrived. Time later to count the dead.

  Meanwhile, the morning was reaching into its full glory. It was the tenth fine day in a row. The onion domes of the forty times forty churches of Moscow were resplendent in the sun. The domes, covered with gold leaf, glowed as if they were children of the sun, and their bells, celebrating this event, came forth in a variety of clangor, loud or delicately toned. But to the ears of those walking away from the field, the sound of wailing was still in their ears, a cacophony of whimpering, howling, bawling, blubbering, sorrowing, and lamentation in unholy disharmony to the bells.

  I, however, aroused by the extent of our triumph, felt as if I could see into the failings of half the people I passed. So many were sick in heart, sick in soul, sick in stomach, slime clinging to their spirit, lost in the vortex of a dream. Meanwhile, the sun reflected the gold of the onion domes above each church. For the past half year, laborers in high peril of slipping off the steep pitches of church roofs rimed in winter ice had labored nonetheless at fastening new leaf to these gilded domes.

  13

  At noon, before the Tsar and Tsarina arrived, most of the litter on Khodynskoe Field had been cleared. There was still torn clothing on the sand and in the pits, but the bodies were gone. Several companies of soldiers had been brought in to move the last of the dead out beyond the outlying kiosks. There, laid in orderly rows, they would remain until the wagons could transport them to a cemetery or relatives came upon their remains with shouts and screams of recognition. Of course, Nicky and Alix, on their arrival, were seated far enough away not to hear such sounds. Instead, a chorus of a thousand young men and women had been installed in front of the Royal Pavilion, and their voices prevailed. The viewing stands were filled with distinguished foreigners and Muscovites in their best uniforms, the ladies in afternoon finery. The social principle that one must never recognize unpleasantness during a formal occasion was in force. I have been present at galas when a guest, usually one of ours, breaks wind. The repugnance felt by those nearby will sit in the air for a few moments. Sometimes longer. No one remarks on it. For the social record, it has not happened. This abili
ty to ignore the repellent has always been the ingrained strength of the upper classes.

  Now, hearing this gifted chorus of one thousand heavenly voices offering a vocal collation, who would be in a rush to recognize that a few hours ago horrors had raged? No, the well-dressed Russians in the pavilions, given their desire to ape the best manners of the British upper classes, now carried themselves like privileged onlookers enjoying a notable day at the races. The ladies and gentlemen in the stands would have looked near to perfect, but for one contretemps. An unbelievably strong wind blew up without warning and scattered clouds of dust across the parade ground. This noxious whirlwind soon reached the pavilions at the edge of Khodynskoe. There should have been no such wind on so glorious a day. All had been still. Yet the gust had come. I hardly knew if I was witnessing the fury of the Dummkopf or the rage of the dead.

  On the tail of this wind, the Tsar and Tsarina arrived. Everything changed. It was as if the gale were ready to be dispelled by one more uproar of cheers so loud one could barely hear the band, that immense orchestra of national brass that played the anthem with stentorian exaltation. Khodynskoe Field was now only half-visible in the fresh dust roused by the carriages of the latecomers arriving after the tumult of the morning. Soon enough, Nicky and Alexandra waved to people flocking in and, shortly after, left the pavilion to step into their carriage and be driven a few hundred yards over to Petrovsky Palace, where the Tsar would receive selected groups of chosen citizens. In the glimpse I caught of him, he looked exceptionally pale, and I wondered if he knew what had happened. I suspect his information was still highly imperfect but, in any event, the prearranged ceremonies were maintained. Not a quarter mile from Khodynskoe, Nicky and Alix now stood at the Petrovsky gates to receive these new delegations. In all, there were fourteen groups bearing gifts. A special offering from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was presented to Nicky and Alix first—a large platter for ceremonial bread and salt. Nine months had been spent by eight men carving this platter out of crystal. Nicky screwed up his buttocks to force a little gratitude into his expression and then proceeded to thank the eight workers for the splendid niceties of their work. Next came a Cavalry regiment, the Georgiyevskys. A delegation of peasant women was followed by distinguished artists of the Moscow Imperial Theater. After which, a delegation from the Moscow coachmen paid their respects. There was even a gift from the Moscow All-Believers, who offered a silver platter on which Nicky’s initials had been laid out in diamonds. They were soon replaced by an army of contractors who had decorated Moscow with lights and false fronts for the Processional on May 9. Representatives of the caterers, plus the Society of the Hunt, the Moscow Racing Club, and even (for their centuries of service since the time of Peter the Great) a few leaders of the long-established German colony in Moscow came filing by. After this, Nicky and Alix were able to enter the palace and preside over a feast for the honored representatives of the common people. Inserting his remarks between choruses of cheers, Nicholas II spoke to these plebeian elders: “The Empress and I heartily thank you for your expression of love and dedication. We do not doubt these feelings are shared by your fellow villagers. Care for your welfare is close to my heart.”

  I happened to look at the time. To me, this is no more than a phrase. I do not need a watch. No devil is ever without a clear sense of the hour, the minute, even the second. So I can state that as the Tsar was making this speech, a simultaneous event occurred at a morgue—a devil reported the exact time of the other occasion. Two of the corpses that had been laid out on morgue tables happened to rise up out of their comatose state. They even cried out in unison. From opposite ends of the room! They had appeared to be dead, but now they were obviously alive.

  If I mention these upstarts, it is to emphasize the conjunction of the two occasions. I would even learn that Alix was suffering her own climax of foreboding at what had to be close to the same moment. To each of the guests who came forward, she had smiled and bobbed her head, still a pouter pigeon. She was, however, living in terror. She was filled with a thought that her own death was near and so was Nicky’s. In what danger was her husband! She even allowed herself to feel some open wrath against the Russian people. Why, she asked herself, had they felt so obliged to riot? She even said to her husband, “There is little courtesy among our Moujiks.” Nicky did not know whether to be offended or pleased that she spoke of our Moujiks. (These thoughts I received at second hand from a special Russian devil who maintained his entrée to one of Alix’s ladies-in-waiting.)

  A half mile away from Petrovsky Palace, some soldiers were laying out the last of the victims, and on those far fringes of Khodynskoe Field, other hundreds of peasants and Muscovites were searching for lost family. Meanwhile, Nicky proceeded from table to table offering greetings to the villagers as they ate their Poltava Borscht, their veal with fresh greens, cold whitefish, roast spring chicken, duckling, fresh and pickled cucumbers, dessert, fruit, wines.

  Back in the stands, jugglers and Gypsy dancers were performing for the gentry. Ice cream was being sold. And behind the hutches, corpses were still being laid out in rows while distraught relatives kept staring into the battered faces of those cadavers who had perished hours ago but might, despite all disfigurement, still retain a recognizable feature. A few of the disappointed even laid a copper coin on the cold chest of a stranger. In some places, piles of bodies remained in a heap, fifty here, twenty there, arms and legs at outraged angles, filthy clothing. Doctors knelt in the dust to see if anyone stirred. All of a sudden, one of the dead was no longer to be counted as dead. He rose up. His wife, who had been weeping beside him, began to beat herself on the breast. “God is here!” she screamed, “God is here! God has saved you!” But another family, just fifty feet away, engaged in false mourning for the demise of a long-lived family patriarch, were now shrieking. For that old tyrant had also opened his eyes. “The Devil sent you back, you monster!” his aged wife cried out.

  14

  I was not a leading actor during the riots just described. The Maestro had stated it directly: I was not sufficiently familiar with Moscow to command the local devils. Instead, I was to continue my watch on Nicky. I had to recognize that I had not been seen as pitiless enough to lead on the field. That pinched my vanity. I saw myself as capable of any task, high or low, but I should have known that my assignment to study the letters and diaries of the Romanovs would remain my basic role. Nonetheless, the knowledge proved of use for years to come. The Romanovs did not perish in a bloody muck of broken bones on that day, but they would certainly suffer depredations in the aftermath.

  An immediate result was the lowered efficiency of the Cudgels. There were now gaps in the circle of protection they formed around Nicky. I was able, for example, to approach within reasonable distance of the Tsar when he and Alix showed up at midday to sit in the viewing stands. By grace of the passage which the Maestro had succeeded in keeping open to his thoughts, I could detect that Nicky was not only unseemly pale as he approached the pavilion, but that this pallor came from an unruly passion. I could feel its intensity. Some turn red with rage. He was pale with unspoken fury. Like Alix, his primal displeasure was directed toward the peasants. How could they have been so ungrateful, so self-destructive? Yet—heavy as chains lying upon his heart—it was his duty to forgive them. Could he call upon such a noble sentiment when he was marooned in anger? There were so many aspects to his fury. For he was equally enraged at the ineptitude of the police. And, soon enough, was furious at himself. He had not paid attention to the arrangements for security. Much of this could have been prevented. Or was that true? Had the event been inevitable? Were his fortunes cursed? He did not know. He could hardly know. That night, he wrote in his diary:

  Up till now, thank God, everything went perfectly but today a great sin has taken place. The crowd spending the night on the Khodynka meadow broke through the barrier and there was a terrible crush, during which it is terrible to say about 1,300 people were trampled.

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nbsp; I kept studying the phrase “a great sin has taken place.” Was it the rioters or himself to whom he referred? For on the afternoon of May 18, Count Witte, who was the particular statesman Nicky listened to most, had sent word: “In respect for the dead, all festivities should be canceled immediately.” Then, Witte added, “Most particularly, the French Ambassador’s Ball.” That was scheduled to take place on this very night, and it had been planned as the grandest evening of the Coronation.

  Disagreement with Count Witte came quickly. Nicky’s uncle, the Governor General of Moscow, the Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, married to Alix’s older sister, Ella, had taken over, among his other duties, the position of Director of the Peasants’ Festival. By messenger, Sergey Alexandrovich sent a reply to Witte: “The Tsar considers Khodynka a great disaster, but would inform you that in effect it was not so great a disaster that it should darken the Coronation holiday.”

  The older Grand Dukes, brothers to this Governor General, were in accord. Their sentiments, however, were revolting to Nicky’s cousins, the younger generation of Grand Dukes. Indeed, Nicky’s dearest friend—his first cousin Sandro, who was married to Nicky’s sister Xenia—declared that the attitude of his uncles, these older Romanovs, this senior level of Grand Dukes, could only be described as “monstrous.” And Sandro’s brothers, the sons of Grand Duke Mikhail, were in passionate agreement. Under no circumstances should Nicky attend the French Ball tonight. What an outrageous insult to the dead! Where was Russia’s honor? The Tsar, four days into his Coronation, was ready to agree with Sandro, but just then came Uncle Alexey into the room, and this Grand Duke was the oldest remaining brother of his dead father.