He lived in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, trying to feed himself and make sense of emigre politics. But the Second World War found him in Yugoslavia, where he fought bravely with the partisans and organized liaison with the approaching Soviet Army staff^. Russian generals wined and dined him, and—on orders, of course—urged him to return to the Motherland's forgiving embrace. Tears of love for Russia fell into cups of vodka. Not nearly so naive to believe the "times-have-changed, Russia-needs-its-best-sons" orations, Ilya Alexandrovich nevertheless felt alone and weary of exile. And curious.
On the plane to Moscow in 1946, the tone of the accompanying officers changed in one breath from respectful to reviling. The next moment, handcuffs went on. "Counterrevolutionary!" "Enemy of the People!" "Traitor to the Motherland!" Perhaps Ilya Alexandrovich had been a trifle naive after alclass="underline" he could not quite banish images of the Leningrad apartment and curatorship of a small handicrafts museum he had been promised for a modest but comfortable—and contributing—middle age. Instead, he was treated to the zombie conditions and surrealistic interrogations of Lubyanka's basement. (Relatively few questions were put about the former Prince's prerevolutionary life or even his Civil War activities; it was emigre affairs in Paris and, especially, aspects and personalities of the Yugoslav partisan high command that concerned his inquisitors.)
Two years passed. The trip from the Moscow military airport to jail had been in a Black Maria. Aside from his jailors and interrogators, Ilya Alexandrovich did not, in that period, see another soul, Russian or otherwise.
Suddenly—and mysteriously, for 1948 was a time of big leaps in repression and terror, especially after Tito's break with
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Stalin—his imprisonment ended. And means for him to contribute to the Motherland were indeed found: after a period of rest and rehabilitation, he was served up to foreign dignitaries, delegations, and the occasional visiting newsmen as evidence of Soviet goodwill to former class enemies. What more satisfying proof of the harmony of all peoples under socialism than this still-robust man, with the name second only to Romanov, thriving in Moscow? And happy in his humble but honest job—for one had been found for him, teaching Slovenian in a language institute.
Substitutes frequently took over his classes, however; Ilya Alexandrovich was always on call to be driven with a group of foreign visitors to one of the family's former estates, now an orphanage, in a lyrical valley southwest of Moscow. "How happy I am that these buildings are being used for the good of unfortunate children instead of ludicrous private privilege," he would say (in French, Italian, German or Dutch—but, most typically, to a British trade union delegation tearing with joy for the use to which the magnificent mansion, like the Botanical Gardens and the Bolshoi Ballet, was being put under Soviet love for the people).
"I myself have a comfortable apartment in Moscow. (You must visit me sometime.) What on earth could I have wanted with a time-wasting extravagance like this? I can only thank the elected representatives for freeing me of endless roof-repairing and wrangling with gardeners; and bless them for making it possible that my family's wealth and greed, so often the source of hurt to others, is at last contributing to my people's happiness."
KGB officials stood at both elbows, and the tour leaders—also secret policemen, of course, like the picked chauffeurs—strained for his every word. But Ilya Alexandrovich's declarations were not pure hypocrisy; he was not lying even when he suggested that in their common recognition of service as man's redemption, Communism and the Orthodox church were far from incompatible. Whatever else he felt—and it was not, despite everything, that his homecoming had been an unqualified mistake—the former heir to literally incalculable wealth did not want his estates returned. In this sense, he was grateful to the Revolution.
The Lenin Library X 89
But he was no less grateful to be relieved of his role and left in relative peace. This happened gradually in the 1950s, as his novelty value declined in proportion to the greater numbers of foreigners admitted to post-Stalinist Russia. Finally, he was freed entirely of his burden (together with the obligation of having to sign his name to the occasional article about aristocratic perfidy in general and his family's debauches in particular) and treated as a private citizen—in which capacity he turned his full attention to teaching. Lacking a family, he gave his free time to compiling a Slovenian-Russian dictionary. It was a tolerable end to a full life, affording even a degree of dignity, provided he kept his mouth shut. But—and this was the point of his story—he had not seen the last of his trials.
To aid his labors on the dictionary, he was granted use of the Lenin Library—even assigned to Reading Room Number One. During breaks, he took to reading about the cataclysmic civil war in which he had played a minor part. What deprived him of a quiet old age was not the textbooks—teaching had fully acquainted him with the appalling distortions codified there— but that even in scholarly works, even archives, a great mass of evidence had apparently been destroyed. The Russian people were being deprived not only of the truth but also of the means of ever resurrecting it.
His dismay centered around Kolchak, the dazzling naval hero turned anti-Bolshevik war lord. Ilya Alexandrovich had long questioned the Admiral's Siberian adventure: having mistakenly involved himself in politics, he thought, the professional sailor had been inevitably sucked into the deception and terrible cruelty practiced on both sides. But what of his earlier brilliance in Russia's service? The supercharged dynamism and dedication to standards, the furious resolve and labors that had transformed the Navy from feudal stagnation to a modern force—and gave splendid victories to the Admiral's squadrons on the high seas? All this was gone, together with any hint of Kolchak's magnificent patriotism and courage. Portraying him only as an arch enemy of revolution, Soviet historians had ruthlessly eliminated every reference to his prerevolutionary virtues and achievements —even to his existence. Like Trotsky, he had been made into a counterrevolutionary villain in a state fable.
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After all Ilya Alexandrovich had made peace with in his own Hfe, the odious assassination of Kolchak's memory became unbearable. The Admiral's execution began to dominate his memories. ("I've looked death in the face more than once," the condemned man had answered the officer in charge. "Thank you for your offer, but I have no need for a blindfold now.") Ilya Alexandrovich became possessed by the knowledge that in another decade, no power on earth would be able to rescue Kolchak from the quicksands of ideological villainy and insensate myth. Eyewitnesses and subordinates would all be dead, and even if tsarist archives had been preserved somewhere, a fair history of the leader and his contribution—even his tragedy— could never be produced. And if understood, this very tragedy— symbolic of so many of Russia's—of a good man's destruction contained more potential enlightenment than the hate-provoking official liturgy of Red saints and White devils. How did this officer whose honesty and chivalry approached the quixotic become a Caesar, presiding over (if not personally directing) a brutal tyranny?
This was Ilya Alexandrovich's new triaclass="underline" for lack of anyone else, it had fallen to him to assemble a chronicle. Accepting the challenge, he felt a resurgence of his youthful commitment to honor, duty and country, as if this was the culmination of his cadet training. Secret research became the lonely man's obsession. Stealthily excerpting from rare naval histories and class-books, warily tracking down former naval officers among the handful who survived, the octogenarian was assembling the makings of a monograph on his former commander and was dieting carefully so as not to die before completing it.