The play ended with an eerie scene of a Russian Orthodox memorial service. The church choir Meyerhold had brought in seemed to be ringing the death knell for the regime, the country, and its capital. The curtain fell not only on Lermontov’s
The applause seemed to have no end. Baskets of flowers and laurel wreaths piled up on the stage. When Yuriev came out for a bow, the audience stood. Then came a solemn announcement that a gift from Nicholas II had been bestowed upon Yuriev—a gold cigarette case ornamented with a diamond-studded eagle. Few could guess that this imperial gift would be the last in the history of the Russian stage. Ironically, theater connoisseurs exchanged glances.
Everyone knew that Yuriev was homosexual—he didn’t hide his sexuality. Thus the gift from the prudish tsar was puzzling. The public still remembered the scandal of 1911, when Nijinsky was suddenly fired from the imperial theaters, the excuse being that his costume was too daring. But rumor had it that the dancer’s love affair with Diaghilev had displeased the royal family.
Akhmatova, who saw Meyerhold’s production of
Akhmatova did not have a car or private coach, and coachmen refused to take her from the theater to the Vyborg side, where she was living at the time. They explained in embarrassment that it was impossible to go that far, they might get killed. “Young lady, I have two children,” one driver explained. Another agreed reluctantly. “He probably had no children,” Akhmatova recalled with melancholy. And so her coach rolled past rebellious troops in the streets of Petrograd.
A few days later Nicholas II saw he was no longer capable of controlling events and reluctantly abdicated. The unthinkable had occurred: the monarchy in Russia had fallen. In Petrograd, power passed formally to the provisional government, which immediately declared an amnesty for political prisoners, and in fact into the hands of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, who controlled the army, railroads, post, and telegraph. Everyone agreed that the people’s revolution had been a gigantic improvisation. According to Viktor Shklovsky, it “happened instead of being organized.”112 Shklovsky pictured this revolution as “a thing that was light, blinding, unreliable, and joyous.”
Petrograd was shaken by innumerable rallies with fiery orators making speeches for hours to spellbound audiences. Still, the war with the Germans continued, even though the army and the nation were exhausted. Freedom from the tsarist regime had not brought bread, either, and the capital roiled with the anger of the hungry. Revolutionary developments zigzagged and soon it came to pass that Vladimir Lenin became one of the most famous politicians in Petrograd. Recently returned from exile, he was the leader of a small faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party called Bolsheviks.
Lenin and his party colleague, Leon Trotsky, were both known as hypnotic orators, each in his own style. Trotsky’s temperament carried the audience away, while Lenin persuaded with seeming simplicity and logic. The provisional government could not explain to the soldiers why it was necessary to continue the war, to the workers why factories were shutting down, nor to the peasants why the land was not being redistributed to them. Speaking from the balcony of Kchessinska’s town house (the dancer had fled during the revolution and the Bolsheviks turned her palace into their headquarters), Lenin told the crowds that the war must be ended and promised the people instant well-being as soon as the power of the bourgeoisie was destroyed. A politician of genius with a brilliant understanding of mass psychology, Lenin talked in language of immediate goals, persuading the tired and hungry masses that an instant solution was possible for all the complex problems at hand.
The Petrograd intelligentsia was in disarray. Their ears belonged to the moderate liberal party of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), which had set the tone for a while in the provisional government. However, seeing that the moderate elements were quickly losing ground, the more opportunistic members of the Petrograd elite tried to establish contacts with the Bolsheviks as well. One of the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd was the columnist and playwright Anatoly Lunacharsky, considered an expert on culture among the party comrades. That is why Yuriev, the leading actor of the Alexandrinsky (formerly Imperial) Theater, unexpectedly invited Lunacharsky to his apartment in the fall of 1917 to discuss the fate of the capital’s culture.
