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The Soviet’s voice was being heard more and more.

Soon after the holy man was incinerated, Alix had a dream—much more terrible than the one with the amputated arm she had once written about to Nicky.

Grigory came to her, and his entire body was covered in terrible wounds. “They will burn you all in bonfires. All of you!” he shouted. Immediately the room was set ablaze. He beckoned to her to run and she rushed toward him, but it was too late. The whole room was lit up in flame, and the fire had already enveloped her—when she woke up, choking on her scream.

The Provisional Government was weakening. The voice of the new world was growing louder and louder, the Petrograd Soviet stronger and stronger.

In April 1917, Lenin and about three dozen Bolsheviks left Switzerland and traveled through a Germany that was at war with Russia—the émigrés were hastily returning to Petrograd.

Germany was allowing them to cross its territory in a sealed train car. Later Karl Radek, a passenger on that train, wrote that the car was not sealed at all—they were simply obliged not to leave it, and two German officers sat inside. For all this there remained the train’s puzzling delay of many hours on German territory.

From quiet Switzerland Lenin would land in turbulent Russia. At the beginning of the year he had still not believed in the possibility of any kind of revolution in Russia in his generation’s lifetime. Scarcely having set foot on Petrograd soil, however, Lenin proclaimed the path to a new, socialist revolution. Power must transfer from the hands of the Provisional Government to the Soviets. Lenin talked about a peaceful transfer of power, a peaceful revolution. But he was taken from the station to Kschessinska’s mansion—Bolshevik headquarters—by a tank of armed sailors.

In July, to demonstrate the Bolsheviks’ strength, the sailors of Kronstadt entered the city.

From her prison fortress, Anya observed this new calamity with horror: “No one slept that night, parades of sailors marched down our street toward the Tauride Palace. It felt terrible, disastrous. They marched by the thousands, dusty, tired, with horrible, brutalized faces, carrying enormous placards: ‘Down with the Provisional Government,’ ‘Down with the War.’ The sailors, including women, were riding in trucks with set bayonets. General Belaev and the imprisoned naval officers were rushing around the house of detention in horror. Our head guard announced that if the sailors approached the prison, the guard would go out to meet them and surrender their arms, since they were on the Bolsheviks’ side.

Although the government put down this July demonstration, one could already catch a glimpse of the future in this ominous element.

But no one did.

A peaceful life. He “cultivated his own garden,” as Rousseau taught. He cleaned paths, sprinkled ditches, and burned downed trees. A return to childhood. As he had once worked in the garden with his father. Only now his children were working alongside him.

“6 May. Turned 49, not far from half a century.”

But the new world’s hatred kept breaking through the palace fence more and more often.

“3 June.… Sawed up some tree trunks. That was when the incident with Alexei’s bayonet happened: he was playing with it, and the riflemen walking in the garden saw it and asked an officer to take it to guard quarters.… Fine officers who lack the nerve to refuse the lower ranks!”

In Petrograd rumors were going around that the tsar and his family had fled.

A representative of the Soviet, Socialist Revolutionary Mstislavsky, appeared at Tsarskoe Selo wearing a dirty sheepskin coat (as revolutionaries are supposed to show up at hated tsarist palaces) with a revolver poking out of his holster. He took out a warrant and demanded to be allowed to hand it personally to the emperor, for rumors about the flight of Nicholas the Bloody was called now more and more often) were alarming the worked soldiers.

The guard was indignant: “Do you think we’re guarding empty rooms?” But Mstislavsky was