Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [117]
Unlike the empress, delicate Nicholas was gracious with the commissar, but their conversations gradually came to focus on Nicholas’s request (or rather, dream):
“Why won’t you let us walk in town? You can’t actually be afraid that I shall run away?”
The little man did sense the concealed ridicule, and he responded gravely. “I don’t have the slightest doubt of it, Nicholas Alexandrovich, Generally speaking, an attempt to escape would only make matters worse—for you and your family.” (Just in case, he warned him.)
“So what is the matter, kind sir? I was in Tobolsk in my youth, I remember it is a very beautiful town, and I would like to see it—along with my family.”
But the commissar rejected the notion of a walk.
Nicholas’s diary:
“Recently P. S. Botkin received a paper from Kerensky from which we learned that we are allowed walks outside town.… Pankratov, the rascal, has replied that there can be no question of that now due to some incomprehensible fear for our safety.”
Good-natured Pankratov did not want to disappoint him so he did not explain his “incomprehensible fear”: the chancellery had been inundated with letters and telegrams from all ends of Russia full of threats and obscenities. People were sending nasty depictions of the tsaritsa and Rasputin. What particularly alarmed the commissar was that many of the letters came from Tobolsk. Soldiers back from the front were hanging around town, poor and hardened men “who had spilled a little blood because of the tsar.” No, he could not let the family out into town.
For this Nicholas did not like him.
Nor did the suite—Dolgorukov and Tatishchev—to Pankratov’s astonishment, understand anything either. They never stopped demanding that the tsar be allowed to take walks, citing Kerensky’s promise. Meanwhile, their own walks around town had already begun to provoke grumbling. The soldiers on the street warned the commissar with a chuckle: “If the prince [Dolgorukov] doesn’t stop roaming around town, we’re going to beat him up for starters.” Russia was on the rampage.
The good Pankratov put up with Nicholas’s dislike. He had long since forgiven him for the fortress and fourteen years of his life. Now he simply saw Nicholas as the father of a large family who had absolutely no understanding of this terrible new life. Pankratov became attached to Nicholas’s children and gave the duchesses a book he had written about his sufferings and wanderings through Siberia. The girls read it aloud and liked it. He volunteered to be Alexei’s geography teacher. Nonetheless, Nicholas did not like him.
In Dr. Botkin’s papers I found a poem that evidently enjoyed great success at that time in Freedom House, a poem written in an elegant hand similar to the empress’s:
Whispering mirrors.
Mirrors in the sad quiet
Of the Winter Palace,
Reflect the brazen glance
Of a shaven face.
In every hall, indifferent,
In every corner,
Someone in a jacket
Gazes upon his greatness.
Once yielding to the dazzle,
The country’s hero imagines,
That all must fall before him
In humble worship.
That the road to splendid glory
Lies before him.
Barely audible, though, in reply,
The mirrors whisper:
“What care we for empty speeches,
Impertinent newcomer,
The triumph of centuries past
Guards this palace.
Power glorious, imperial,
Shadows incorporeal.
No momentary guest shall drive away
The guests of ages past….
… Stop! Never forget too long
Of the crown of the tsar,
He will rise up soon, rise up terribly,
Yellow dawn,
… So, witnesses of the past,
Just as the gloom appears—
The mirrors whisper the word.
The coming truth.”
TOBOLSK 1917
To Nicholas, Pankratov was also a typical civilian with the audacity to lead soldiers. Like a true Romanov, Nicholas did not look favorably upon men who lacked military bearing.
That was why Pankratov remained the “little man.”
The soldiers of the guard too, following Nicholas’s lead, despised the