Visitors in prison! Who but one who has spent days and nights of
anguished loneliness behind bolted doors can possibly imagine the joy of
such anticipation? I looked forward, almost as toward freedom itself, to
the first Friday when I should see my beloved parents. I pictured myself
running forward to embrace them, I could see my father’s kind and loving
smile, my mother’s blue eyes full of happy tears. How we would sit, hand
in hand, and talk over all that had happened since our parting! They
would bring me news, messages, perhaps even letters from those other
captives in Tsarskoe Selo. I should hear that the children were well
again and the Empress’s deepest anxieties were removed.
Alas! the harsh reality of my foolish dreams. When the day came I
limped, between armed soldiers, through the long, gray corridors to the
visitors’ room, and there at the end of a long wooden table which
divided us like an impassable gulf I saw my mother. There was no embrace
allowed, not even a touch of hands. My mother tried to smile, tried to
look at me with the love I craved, but in spite of herself her face
paled and an expression of horror congealed her features. I stood there
before her white with the pasty whiteness of prison, my uncombed,
unkempt hair hanging about my shoulders, my dress dirty and wrinkled
and an unhealed cut ploughing a bloody furrow across my forehead. To the
question she dared not ask I touched the ugly wound and told her it was
nothing, nothing. I could have told her that a soldier named Izotov, in
a fit of animal temper, had knocked me against the edge of the cell
door, and that the cut had received absolutely no attention since. Had
we been alone I should have wept the whole story out on her breast, but
we were not alone. Standing over us like inquisitors were the Procureur
of Petrograd and the terrible Chkoni, governor of the Troubetskoy
Bastion, and afterwards governor of the fortress itself. Ten minutes
only were allowed us, and at the end of eight fleeting minutes Chkoni,
watch in hand, roared out: “Two minutes left. Finish your talk.” But we
had no talk. Sobs choked our words, the few commonplace words that in
such circumstances can be spoken. We could only bid each other be brave
and trust in God’s mercy. We could but gaze and gaze at each other
through streaming tears. Then they separated us.
When the next Friday came I resolved to make myself a little more
presentable. I had no mirror but I begged the Woman to loan me a small,
cracked fragment. They had taken away all my toilet articles and every
single hairpin, but the Woman gave me two hairpins of her own and,
combing my hair with my fingers I arranged it more or less neatly. Every
day I washed and cared for the cut on my forehead and when the visiting
hour at last arrived I fancied that I looked rather more like myself.
This time the precious ten minutes were spent with my father, and
because he had been prepared in advance for the wretched object his
daughter had become our brief interview was less emotional than that of
the preceding Friday. Brave and erect my father held himself before
those brutal jailers, and my heart glowed with love and pride to see
him. We managed to exchange a few sentences and my father told me that
he had obtained permission to send me money to buy tea and a few other
comforts. He told me that he and my mother had waited three hours to see
me and because it had been ruled that they could not both be admitted on
the same day that my mother was standing close to the door of the next
room just to catch the faint sound of my voice. These words roused
Chkoni to a perfect fury. “So!” He fairly yelled. “But I’ll spoil that
game,” and rushing out he slammed the door between the two rooms. My
father flushed crimson but he spoke no word nor, of course, did I. A
single protest might have meant punishment for me, and for us all no
more visits.
I saw my father only three times, my mother a little oftener, as her
health was the better of the two. The money my father sent me did not
reach me except in very minute sums. By far the greater part of it was
kept by the jailers, and gambled away. Not satisfied with that, the men
warned my father that nothing except payment to the prison heads would
save me from death, or worse still from assault by the soldiers. My
father had long ago been deprived of his income, but he and my mother
sold some valuables and gave it to the blackmailers who wanted it only
for more gambling. Their sacrifice gave my parents a little peace of
mind, but it did not save me from three of the most horrible nights I
spent in the fortress. On each of these nights my cell was invaded by
drunken soldiers who threatened me with unspeakable things. On the first
occasion I simply groveled on the wet floor and prayed the man, in the
name of his mother and mine, to let me alone, and, drunk as he was, my
words actually penetrated his dark soul and shamed it. The next men were
less drunk but were far more bestial. At the sight of them I threw
myself against the wall and pounded frantically, screaming at the top of
my lungs. Mme. Soukhomlinoff heard and understood. She screamed too,
frightfully, and with all her might shook the heavy door of her cell.
This brought the guard and once more I was saved. The third time I was
so paralyzed with fright that I could not scream. I simply fell on my
knees, holding up my little ikon, and begged like a trapped animal. The
man hesitated a moment, spat on me contemptuously, and left. The next
day, half dead with shame and fear, I managed to tell the Woman all that
had passed. Indignantly she went to the Governor of the fortress, and
after that even I, “the worst woman in prison,” was spared the ultimate
insult.
Although we could not know it, things were gradually changing for the
better in the fortress. A little physical improvement was apparent. The
cold had lessened and in our short walks in the prison yard we could see
that lovely spring, with its fresh green leaves and springing flowers,
had come to stay. I remember one day seeing in the grass a little yellow
flower. It may have been a buttercup or a dandelion or something else
we ordinarily call weeds, but to my eyes it was an exquisite thing.
Audaciously I stooped and picked it, hiding it quickly in the bosom of
my dress. The next visiting day I showed it to my father and dropped it
on the table. On leaving the room he contrived to get hold of it and
after his death in 1918 I found it, carefully preserved among his
private papers. I never picked another flower in that prison yard,
although once I tried. But this time a guard caught me, and struck the
flower from my hand with the end of his rifle.
Things were improving under the surface, but aside from the welcome
change in the weather conditions seemed for a time no better. In the
cell adjoining that of Mme. Soukhomlinoff was my old friend General
Voyeikoff, who was tortured almost as pitilessly as myself. My heart
ached for him. In cell 69 was for some time the police detective
Manouiloff, but when he was removed to another prison the writer
Kolichko was placed in the cell. Kolichko, poor wretch, was so overcome
by his arrest and imprisonment that during the first nights he sobbed so
long and bitterly that I found it impossible to sleep. I was so unhappy
that I began to pray for death, and once I even resolved to end my life.
I had no weapon but a rusty needle which I had picked up and carefully
concealed, but I had heard somewhere that there was a spot at the base
of the brain which if punctured ever so little would cause death. Before
seeking that spot I felt that I must say adieu to my brave little friend
Mme. Soukhomlinoff, and so softly I rapped out a farewell message on the
wall. Her quick mind instantly divined my intention and without losing
any time she sent for the Woman and my rusty needle was taken away from
me.
It began to be sultry in the Troubetskoy Bastion and the air in the
cells became thick and foul. My small window, which looked out on a
narrow court and a high wall, admitted little light and no breeze at
all. I used to climb painfully up on the iron shelf which did duty for a
table and pressing my face close to the bars I breathed in all the air
possible. Instead of seeking the warm corner of my cell I now sat for
hours together with my body against the wettest and coldest stones. My
despondency increased every day, and I almost ceased to pray or to
believe that the universe held any God to whom the prayers of captives
could ascend. Yet all the time God was sending me help.
One day a soldier came to my cell and roughly bade me get up and go with
two guards for examination. Not knowing exactly what that meant, I rose
from my cot and followed the men to a room in the fortress where the
High Commission of Inquiry appointed by Kerensky was then in session.
Bewildered by the sudden transition from the bastion to a room full of
comfortable furniture, and almost blinded by the brilliant light and
sunshine, I had all I could do to answer their few inconsequential
questions. I have described this first examination in another chapter,
and I shall not repeat it here. It was so foolish that afterwards in my
hot and ill-smelling cell I actually found myself laughing, and it had
been a long time since I had laughed. Judge Roudneff, the only one of
the commission who showed himself fair-minded or even capable of just
judgment, was present at the inquiry, but I do not think he said a word.
Afterwards he was charged with full responsibility of my case, and I
appeared before him no less than fifteen times. At the close of the
first of these personal interviews I thanked Judge Roudneff warmly.
Astonished, he asked: “For what do you thank me?” And I answered: “For
the happiness of four whole hours of sitting in a room with a window,
and through it a glimpse of green trees.” He did not reply except with a
kind and sympathetic look, but I knew that his heart was touched, and
that he received a new conception of what life meant to a prisoner.
Better things still were to come. Without our being aware of it the
revolutionary mania had begun to subside a little and those men among
our guards who had once been clean and decent were now getting back to
their normal state of mind. Poor soldiers! Never let me forget that they
were not to blame for the torments they inflicted on me and other
prisoners. It was not they who invented the black calumnies that made me
seem a creature undeserving of mercy or any clemency. It was not they
who fashioned the cross on which I was crucified. The soldiers did only
what they were incited to do by men and women far above them, people who
conspired to crush me that they might crush the Empress. The soldiers I
forgive, but I cannot yet forgive those others. The fate of the Imperial
Family, the ruin of Russia, is on their souls. For what they did they
have never shown any penitence, but those rough soldiers in the fortress
repented and did what they could in atonement. One of the head guards
was a man, handsome in a rustic sort of fashion, who at first had
treated me with great insolence. One morning this man opened my door,
hesitated for a moment, and then said in a low voice: “I am very sorry
for you. Please take this,” and vanished. “This” was an apple and a
small piece of white bread. Another morning the soldier who brought my
breakfast spoke in a grumbling aside but loudly enough for me to hear:
“What idiocy to keep a poor sick woman in this place.” One night the
window in my cell door was pushed aside and in a trembling voice someone
begged me to give him my hand. Tears fell on it while the unseen friend
told me that he was a boy from Samara, and that it broke his heart to
see women caged like beasts in such holes. He must have had a good
mother, that boy. Perhaps they all had, for it became almost a habit for
men passing through my corridor to slip me bits of bread, sausage, or
sugar.
The most wonderful piece of good fortune came through the soldier in
charge of the prison library. This man visited my cell one day, and
after giving me a keen look which I could not understand he laid the
library catalogue on my cot and went out. I had little interest in the
dull books at our disposal, but when one sits hours in utter idleness he
makes occupation out of almost nothing. I opened the catalogue and
turned the leaves. To my astonishment out fell a folded paper.
Cautiously I opened it and read these words: “Dear Anushka, I am sorry
for you. If you have five rubles I can get a letter to your mother.” For
a long time after the incriminating paper had been destroyed I sat
trembling in doubt and foreboding. I had barely five rubles, and if I
gave them would they be gambled away? Was the letter a trap? Was it
merely an effort to get me into trouble? I did not know, but on a bit of
blank paper left in the catalogue I wrote with my stub of a pencil: “I
have suffered so much already that I cannot believe that you wish to do
me any more harm.” Folding the five rubles and the paper into a tiny
note, I tucked it into the catalogue and waited. After a while the
librarian returned, and this time I read in his silent gaze that he was
asking for my confidence. The next day he came back and again left the
catalogue on my bed. This time I seized it eagerly and shook its leaves.
A letter from my mother dropped out, a short letter, for she had been
given only a few minutes to write, but I read and reread it until I knew
every word by heart.
Then began a smuggled correspondence with my father and mother, they
gladly giving money to the men who risked their own liberty by carrying
the letters back and forth. The letters reached me in prison books, in
the sheets of my bed, under the tin basin which held my food, and once
even in a soldier’s sock dropped carelessly on the floor. In this sock
was concealed a note from Lili Dehn, free now and in correspondence with
the family at Tsarskoe Selo. There was a slip of paper enclosed with a
tiny white flower glued to it, and in the Empress’s handwriting: “God
keep you.” Another precious souvenir of the Empress sent me by my mother
was a little moonstone ring long ago given me at Tsarskoe. Tearing a rag
from the lining of my coat, I made a bag for this jewel, and begging a
safety pin from the Woman, I pinned it inside my dress. The poor
librarian. This was the last favor he ever did me, for falling under the
suspicion of the Governor, he was abruptly discharged. The letters,
however, had done me so much good that I was in every way better and
more cheerful. I felt in touch with the world again. I knew in a general
way what was going on, and though not all the news was pleasant it gave
me a sense of being alive and not altogether hopeless. I knew now what
tireless efforts were being made in my behalf, and I felt that in the
end something must come of them. My parents had done everything humanly
possible to move Kerensky but without any definite success. The first
appointment with him was made through his secretary Chalpern, and
although my parents were naturally exactly on time Kerensky kept them
waiting for two hours. When at last they were received my parents were
told that the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, Rasputine, and Viroubova
were responsible for the Revolution and would have to suffer for it. My
parents had heard this before, but it was new to them to hear from
Kerensky that he knew that I had had a great many diamonds from the
Archbishop Pitirim and for that and other reasons nothing could be done
for me. Later he softened a little and ended the interview by promising
that my whole affair would be investigated. My parents then contrived an
interview with the minister of Justice, Pereverzeff. They made two
appointments in fact, for the first one Pereverzeff deliberately broke,
going out for the day while my parents sat waiting in an ante-room. The
next time my mother went to the Ministry she was received and was
civilly treated. Pereverzeff also promised that a fair investigation
would be made. By this time the Special Commission of Inquiry was
sitting and my mother managed to see the president, Mouravieff. She took
with her a letter from his brother to me before the abdication of the
Emperor. In this letter I was warned of plots against me and was advised
to leave the palace. I had replied to this letter, and my mother had a
copy of my reply. I had written that I would never leave the Empress. My
conscience was clean before God and man and I would remain to the end
where God had placed me. I was astonished that a soldier should advise
me to run away from a battlefield. Mouravieff who at first had been very
harsh, changed after reading the letters. He even asked my mother to
allow him to read them to the commission. They were significant, he
said. As soon as my case had been referred to Judge Roudneff he called
my parents to the Winter Palace, where he had his office, and talked
with them, asking a great many questions, for nearly four hours. In this
examination, for it was really that, my father and mother were allowed
for the first time to defend me, to make explanations of obscure
charges, to tell my life story to the man who was to judge me. No one
else gave them such an opportunity, not even the Georgian deputy
Cheidze, then very prominent in the Petrograd Soviet. Cheidze was kind
and said that he would do anything in his power to help me to get
justice, but I do not think he ever did anything. Members of the
Provisional Government, Rodzianko and Lvoff, to whom, while they were
still in power, my parents had written begging to be received, never
even replied to the letters.
One day, sitting in my cell and remembering what had been written me in
the smuggled letters, another wonderful thing happened. In the noon meal
of fish soup which I must eat or starve I found a large piece of really
decent meat. I ate it greedily, of course, and the next day I ate
another piece which had mysteriously arrived. I took the first
opportunity to ask the Woman where the food came from, and she told me
that it was a cook, a poor man whose duty it was to carry food to our
bastion. He too pitied me, she said, and she thought he might be willing
to run almost any risk for me. So almost at once I was again in
correspondence with my parents. This cook did more than carry letters,
the brave man. He brought me food, chocolates, clean clothes, linen,
stockings, and even a fresh frock. Growing bolder, he ventured regularly
to take away my soiled linen and to replace it with clean things. All
during those months in the fortress I had washed my linen and stockings
in cold water, without soap, and in the night had hung them up in the
warm corner on a hook improvised from a broken hairpin. Of course they
were never clean, nor even, when I put them on, very dry, and now they
were stiff with dirt. Can anyone imagine what it was to me to feel a
clean, soft, smooth chemise against my skin?
I am sure the cook could never have done so much for me had not the
guards closed their eyes to his activities. They were nearly all
friendly now, and used to talk with me through the window in my door.
In spring a number of pigeons flocked around the fortress and their
constant sobbing voices got on my nerves. I spoke of this to one soldier
who expressed surprise. “I was shut up here once,” he said, “under the
old Government, and I didn’t find the birds bad at all. I used to feed
them through the window.” “You had a window in your cell,” I exclaimed.
“Then it couldn’t have been as bad as this.” And he assured me that it
wasn’t as bad under the Autocracy as under the beneficent Provisional
Government and the Soviet. The prisoners had much better food and they
could exercise two hours a day in the open.
Another prisoner of the Tsar’s government, a non-commissioned officer
named Diki, who had been very harsh to me in the beginning, now showed
me kindness. Instead of robbing me, as of old, of every little
privilege, he began to allow me an extra five minutes or so in the
courtyard, he, too, saying that in the old days prisoners were better
treated. Another of the guards in the courtyards, a man whom I had
bitterly hated, and with cause, told the Woman that he wanted to speak
to me. Afterwards while walking he approached me and I looked into his
coarse face, deeply pitted with smallpox, and listened in fear at what
he might have to say. Stammeringly he told me that he had just returned
from a leave spent in his home in the Government of Saratoff. Visiting
his sister’s house, he was amazed to see, hanging under the ikon in the
corner of the room, a photograph of me. “What!” he had exclaimed. “Do
you have that shameless woman’s picture in your house?” Whereupon his
brother-in-law retorted: “Never dare to speak against her who was like
a mother to me for two years in Tsarskoe. I was in her own hospital in
the end, and it was like Heaven.” The brother-in-law had charged the
guard with all kinds of messages to me, telling him that they prayed for
me daily in his family and hoped for my release. “Forgive me for being
unjust to you,” said the poor soldier, and offered me his hand. This was
the first news I had of my hospital, and I learned with joy that the
Provisional Government had not closed it. Later I heard that the
Government had not only carried on my work but had added five new
buildings. None of my nurses or orderlies had left, though their openly
expressed faith in me might easily have secured their dismissal. Some of
the invalids had petitioned the Duma for my release, and another group,
indignant because a revolutionary newspaper declined to publish their
letter refuting the usual slanders about me, wanted to leave the
hospital long enough to blow up the office building! They were good at
heart, those misguided Russian soldiers, those poor ignorant children. I
know them, and whatever they have been forced to do in these years of
horror, I still believe them sound and good of soul. In the last days of
my imprisonment in Peter and Paul the guards did not even lock my cell
door. They used to linger and talk, and sometimes they brought paper and
pencils that I might make sketches of them to take home. I was rather
clever with a pencil in those days.