I knelt by the young man who had stood by me for the previous hour. His dark eyes held all the surprise and anguish in the world. Blood guttered in his mouth as he tried to speak. It gurgled from his chest and pooled into the snow around him. “Shh…” I kept saying. “Tishe…” I held his hand between my own as my dress soaked up his blood, and watched his face grow paler. I couldn’t breathe. My mind simply could not comprehend what was happening.

“Marina!” Varvara jerked me up by the arm. “Let’s go!” But I didn’t want to leave him. What if he was trampled? “He’s dead, Marina,” she said. “They’re coming back!” She dragged me away, and we ran, slipping and staggering toward the north side of the square, away from the train station. Another assembly of soldiers at Suvorovsky Prospect picked people off as they fled.

We stumbled into a café that was filling with fleeing demonstrators, and huddled with the startled customers—travelers and tarts with their finery and cheap jewelry. The waiters had closed the curtains, but I peered between them out at the street. A worker held a cloth to his neck while blood poured through his fingers. All through the vast square, people scattered, leaving behind bodies in the snow like so many bundles fallen off a cart.

Varvara wrapped her arm around my waist, her head pressed to mine. Through the parted curtains, we watched men—workers and students with red crosses on armbands—dart back into the square to retrieve the wounded, slinging them over their shoulders and carrying them away. How naive I’d been, thinking I knew what a revolution was. Thinking that we could demand change and it would be given to us because we asked. I shivered, seeing the student’s blood on my dress, my coat, my shoes. His face, the way the sword impaled him. The blue eyes of the horse, the rider. I couldn’t stop shaking.

“You’re all right.” Varvara held me by the shoulders. “Look at me, Marina.” Her face swam into view. “We’ll get those bastards back. This isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning.”

But it seemed like the end to me.

13 The Autocracy Has Spoken

I DIDN’T REMEMBER COMING home, whether people stared at me, covered in blood. Avdokia was there, her soft wrinkled face gray with worry. She laced her arm around my waist and walked me to the bathroom. She got me out of my things, though I was shaking, shaking… took off my coat, my dress, my shoes, soaked in his blood, sticky. I lay in the deep white tub, hot and pink. My lungs ached, my body ached. How could I have thought we could win our freedom? That things could be different? I should have known the weight of what held us down. How thick the walls. How final, how useless.

My old nanny wrapped me in thick towels, put me into a nightgown and a robe. She sat me at my vanity table and combed out my wet hair. Framed in the mirror’s reflection, a perfect fool. No heroine, no revolutionary. Only a pale, frightened girl, so much younger than I thought I was. The picture of Kolya and Volodya smiled up at me from under the glass. It meant nothing to me. Like something from another world.

She tsked and tugged at my wet hair, her little gnome face gazing at me in the mirror over my shoulder. Questions struck me like hard bits of snow, like sand. Wheres and whys, hows. I didn’t want to talk, only to be cared for like a child. She led me into the nursery, where we knelt together in front of the icon of the Virgin of Tikhvin, who knew everything. The lamp flickered in the dimness. My nanny prayed for me, thanking the Virgin for bringing me home safely. I didn’t have to pray. The Virgin knew what had happened. It was too late to pray for the student. Time flowed but one way. I only thanked her that Seryozha had not been there. Then she put me to bed.

Later, I heard my parents come in, speak to the servants. I heard Avdokia telling them I wasn’t feeling well and had fallen asleep. After a while, Seryozha slipped in, sat on my bed, held my hands. He knew what had happened at Znamenskaya Square. “Forgive me,” he kept saying. I could tell he felt cowardly, as though he’d abandoned me. But there was nothing to say. I squeezed his hand. I missed him, I missed the way it had been when it was just the two of us in our beautiful child’s world. Games in the bushes and trees in the Tauride Gardens, our secret language, Rakuku. I missed my own life as if it were already over.

Mother opened the door, dressed for a party, smelling of Après l’Ondée. Her gown rattled with crystal beads like hail on pavement. And here was Father, in tailcoat and brilliant white shirt, threading cufflinks into his cuffs. Soldiers had fired on starving workers and they were going out to a party. What kind of a world was this? I thought of the way the young speaker had fallen from his box, shot like a duck on the wing. I remembered how the soldiers prevented people from leaving the square by forming two lines, the front on one knee, the back standing, and picking us off as we fled. After they were gone, Avdokia came and sat by my bed and stroked my hair. “Marinoushka, what do you have in that head of yours—straw? Don’t you know if anything happened to you, I couldn’t live one day?” I held her hand pressed next to my face and wept.

I dreamed of horses, of being crushed, of falling under a carriage, my leg caught in the traces, being dragged along the ground. I dreamed I was riding a horse over a jump and it caught a hoof, threw me, then fell on me. I wept because I had died and hadn’t even had time to live yet.


Gunfire awakened me. I thought I had dreamed it, but no, there it was, the now familiar crackling. Whom could they be shooting now? Surely the workers had gone to bed long ago. Was it people they’d arrested—could they be executing them? I sat up, turned on the small lamp. Three a.m. How I wished that Kolya were here, someone I could really talk to. But he would never understand me. He would never understand what it felt like to take another’s cause as his own—or, rather, to see his own in another’s. Volodya would understand, but he was far away, in the snows of Galicia.

Instead, I padded to my bookcase and picked out an anthology of poetry, to see if anyone had something to say to me tonight. I kept thinking of Akhmatova’s poem, the one she read that night at the Stray Dog. What would I give now for the people to have their wish? Yes, my happiness, yes my laurel wreath. What a child I’d been.

I sat up in bed, reading, seeking consolation from poets to whom none of this would have been a surprise—Pushkin, Lermontov—when I noticed my door silently opening, as if pushed by a ghost. Was it the student? “Hello?” I whispered.

“It’s me.” Varvara slipped in, carrying an old portmanteau bag. She dropped it onto my bed. “She kicked me out, the witch.”

The high prattling of gunfire still rang out. She’d come all the way from Vasilievsky in this? She sat on my bed, sniffed the lavender cloth with which Avdokia had wiped my face, threw it back in its bowl. I didn’t want to see her. Her being here brought it all back—the stifling crowd, the horses, the woman curled on the ground. “Who let you in?”

She grinned, bouncing on the bed. “I bribed Basya to leave your back entrance open. Don’t be angry. Of all nights, we should be dancing for joy!”

She had lost her mind. We’d been in a massacre. It could have been us. I’d seen a beautiful young man bleed his life out on the stones of the square. I turned over and put the pillow over my head.

She pulled it away from me and threw it on the floor. “The soldiers are in mutiny, Marina. It’s moving among the barracks like a grass fire. Can’t you hear it? They’re rising up. They won’t do it anymore.”

The soldiers who had shot at us today? Please, Holy Mother…

“After the attack today, the strikers went to the barracks and talked to the soldiers. The Pavlovskys broke out to see for themselves. They clashed with the police. We’re not talking strikers now. There’s no going back. It’s mutiny.” The Pavlovsky regiment. The soldiers were fighting with the police. Watch the soldiers, Kolya had always said. I found myself shaking again. Varvara reached into her boot and pulled out a bent papirosa, the cheap cigarettes comprising an inch of bad tobacco and three of cardboard holder. She opened the fortochka and smoked, blowing the fumes out into the night. I could hear the gunfire louder on the clear air. “They’re all coming out. The Volynskys, the Pavlovskys, even the Preobrazhenskys.” The most prestigious Life Guard units. She exhaled a stream of smoke. “Just think, Marina—a quarter of a million soldiers are stationed right here in Petrograd. Add that to a city full of striking workers. That’s storing your powder next to your kindling.”

I thought of the soldiers in Znamenskaya Square. Could they have changed that quickly? Shooting workers at noon, then supporting them at midnight?

“They’ve voted to join the revolution,” she said. “They don’t want to fight the people. Shoot women, children. You saw them today. They hated what they were doing.”

“You mean they’re out there running around? A quarter million soldiers?” I wanted them to support the workers, but I thought of the soldiers on the trams—and imagined the havoc they could wreak. “What if they break into the wine shops?”

“No, no, no. You still don’t understand.” She threw her head back impatiently. “They’re forming soldiers’ councils—soldiers’ soviets. They’re voting for deputies. They’re shooting their officers.” She flicked the end of her cigarette out the window, kicked off her boots, and got into bed with me. She smelled of tobacco and pencil shavings. “There’s no turning back. If it doesn’t succeed, they’ve signed their own death warrants. Better get some sleep, Marina. It’s going to be quite a day tomorrow.”