I was full of hope when I was twenty, and for a short while not only did I have a beautiful bride but we were wonderfully happy.

Oh, Shura… my Shurochka. She was the eldest daughter of the village priest, and she had such a big smile, such straight teeth, and such eyes, so blue. Beautiful blond hair, too, that at night she uncoiled all the way down to her waist. And, oh, what soft parts! A real sweet bee! She was the most beautiful girl in our village-we both came from the same small place, a mere crossroad at the foot of the Urals-and I had always wanted to marry her, knew that I would. And I did! Yes, we got married in the fall of 1904. September. She was just eighteen and I just twenty, and not three days after the ceremony-her father performed it-we fled the countryside. My grandfather’s life had belonged to his master, and he basically died a farm animal, crushed in the mud. Years later, of course, my own father cut himself on his rusty plow and contracted tetanus… just heartbreaking. We had to hammer planks to the side of his bed to keep his quaking body from bouncing onto the floor, then we had to tie him down as his temperature rose… and next he passed from us. Granted, Papa was a free man but he left this world without so much as a single desyatina of land to his name, let alone a single ruble, and so I knew I would be leaving the province as soon as I could. To tell the truth, I didn’t want to doom a son of mine to a fate like Shura’s father, either-a poor priest with a big beard, totally dependent on handouts. No, the back of beyond of Mother Russia had not been kind to us, nor to anyone else in our village for that matter.

As my own dear babushka used to say, “Oi, things were better when we lived under the masters-at least then we didn’t have to worry where we would find tomorrow’s bread!”

And how did I do it, get the money for the train to the city? I stole it. I went to a nearby village and raided the hut of an old woman when she was out milking her only cow. But it turned out it was only enough for two tickets for me and my Shura to get as far as Moscow, which was a problem. Shura wanted to go to the capital. She wanted to go to Sankt Peterburg, the city of the tsars. Da, da, my Shurochka was the daughter of a priest and a true Believer, and she wanted to be nearer her Tsar, which was actually fine by me. Rumor had it that wages were higher in the capital, so I said to Shurochka, “Sure, let’s go.” But getting to Peterburg meant traveling through Moscow and then another night of travel, which was amazingly expensive, of course. And where was I going to get that kind of money, enough for two to travel so very far?

In the end it wasn’t so difficult. I just had to steal more money. And this is what I did: me and a pal walked overnight to another village and snuck into three different huts. And that second time we made out pretty good. When the villagers were at church we stole a pile of money, and my half was enough for two tickets all the way to Sankt Peterburg and even enough to pay for our first few weeks in the capital. Oh, I didn’t tell my Shurochka where I really got the money. No, she would’ve killed me on the spot. So I just told her my rich uncle in a nearby village loaned it to me. Even then she was hesitant, but soon enough she was all right, she was, when I told her that Dyadya Vanya expected to be repaid within a year, no more.

And so we packed bread and some dried fish, two meat pies from Mama, a few clothes, then kissed everyone goodbye and got a blessing from Shura’s Papa, the priest, and set off. Oh, I’ll never forget when, a few days later, our train pulled into the Nikolaevski Station in Peterburg. So many people! So many fine carriages! So many people on the streets selling meat pies and fruits and nuts and… and everything was, well, so exciting! The capital back then was amazing, a glittering heart of golden palaces right in the center and a great ring of smoking factories in the surrounding suburbs. At first it was so exciting because we were in the city of the tsars and we were young and, why, we had real… hope! Da, da, da, for the first time even I felt it, too, something good about the future. For the first time in the history of Mother Russia we were not bound to the land and our destinies were not controlled by our masters, and there we were, thousands of us flooding the cities, hope dangling right before us like a big carrot. It was unbelievable. I didn’t understand it then, couldn’t name it, but we were part of a new class of people, a new generation freed from serfdom, now able to seek a better life in the city, and we were known as the proletariat.

I suppose I first began to realize that things were beginning to pull apart in that autumn of 1904.

It was widely said that the mood of society had not been so bad in several decades, which I did not doubt. We were in that horrible war with Japan and as a consequence I was busy with my workrooms, organizing so many hundreds of women to roll bandages and pack medicaments. Determined to reach out to those in need, I even had my own ambulance trains to see after as well. However, this was Russia, a country ever so slow in awakening, which is to say I was shocked by the confusion, how poorly my instructions were obeyed and how such carelessness caused our help to arrive so slowly in the far east of the Empire. Heavens, there was such terrible, terrible waste as well.

Early that December, Kostya-Grand Duke Konstantin-came to us for dinner. He was so distressed, as were we all, at the strikes and upheavals throughout the nation, and he went on and on.

“Good Lord in Heaven,” said the stately man, who was widely known for his wonderful poetry, “it’s as if a dam has suddenly broken, flooding our Holy Mother Russia with the utmost turmoil.”

“You speak the truth,” agreed my Sergei. “ Russia has been seized with an incredible thirst for change!”

I looked upon my husband, so tall and thin, his narrow face so tight. It’s quite true, Sergei had a very severe belief of the way things should be, an opinion with which I didn’t necessarily agree. But of course I said nothing, for in Russia it was said that a husband was the head of a wife as Christ was head of the church. Upon politics I was therefore not allowed to comment, particularly amongst mixed company.

“Everything is being talked about with such squabble,” continued Kostya. “The cities of Kaluga, Moscow, and Peterburg have unanimously adopted motions asking for every freedom. It’s just absolutely awful. Revolution is banging on the door. Even a constitution is being openly discussed… how shameful, how terrifying.”

Sergei nodded. “A constitution would be madness, sheer madness. I’m afraid our Russia is too backward for such reforms, that our people are neither ready nor mature enough for such things. The so-called parable of equality is just that-a simple story. Freedom and equality would only make the masses drunk and sick, and it would be the ruin of the nation, of that I’m quite sure.”

“Absolutely,” said Kostya enthusiastically. “Democracy is practical only in small countries like France or Britain, not in our huge Russia with our multitudes of different peoples, from Great Russians to Mohammedans.”

Given Sergei’s firm belief in the autocratic principle, it was small wonder that he did not approve of Nicky’s steps, however tentative, to introduce reforms as the most stable course for Russia. But perhaps Sergei was right, perhaps it was as they said: God was Autocrat of All the Universe, and the Tsar was Autocrat of All the Russias. This was, of course, all quite contrary to what I’d been taught by my mother, who believed that liberalism was the best antidote to violence. Then again, this was Russia, an Empire ever so much more Oriental than Occidental.