Interlude
Captain Maria Bochkareva:
The first man ever to demand I be stood against a wall and shot was none other than the ever-so-liberal, too pure for words, Kerensky, the same one who lost Russia to the Reds. He was Minister of War then, and knew less about an army than my last pet dog. Indeed, he was worse, since the dog hadn’t deluded itself that it knew anything, while Kerensky was sure he knew everything. The idiot.
Why did he want me shot? Because I threw my epaulettes at him and refused to appoint a committee to my battalion, my “Women’s Battalion.” And why did I refuse to appoint a committee? Because they’re nothing but talk, talk, talk, and because the appointment of committees had destroyed the Russian Army.
He wasn’t the last one, though, to want me shot. I escaped a Bolshevik firing squad by the skin of my teeth, by divine intervention, and by a Red soldier who remembered that I’d saved his life during the war. Twice it was that I avoided being shot by the Reds. Think of it: twice. I doubt I’d escape a third time.
Well, yes, I won the fight with Kerensky, the swine, but events and time saw my dear battalion disbanded anyway. Oh, all right, we were not disbanded so much as dispersed. With an armed mob numbering in the thousands looking for us, the commandant at Molodechno and his staff provided documents and money to let the girls—except for twenty whom the Bolsheviks had murdered . . . no, they did worse than just kill them; I don’t like to think about it—scatter in different directions over the course of a couple of days.
They were the children I’d never had. It was hard, so very hard, to see them go.
Some months later, I was in Moscow—this was one of the occasions where the Reds wanted to shoot me—and found thirty of my girls in a hospital, on the verge of being thrown into the street by the Reds. These were sick girls, wounded, shell-shocked, a couple off the deep end, yes, that, too. And some with that nasty illness that seemed to be sweeping the globe. “Influenza,” I think they called it. Said it was from Spain. Maybe it was; I don’t know.
All I could think of to do with them was to bring them to my home village near Tomsk, in Siberia, and find some place to shelter them. Look, I never liked the Bolsheviks and their rule by committee. But I didn’t even hate them when they tried to have me shot. When they started to toss my sick girls out into the street, though, that’s when I began to hate them. I begged and borrowed the money I needed to move them. I even went and enquired at the Convent of Martha and Mary about getting a couple of nurses to accompany us.
It was also at about that time that I heard about the daring rescue of the royal family, or a part of it. I’d never cared for tsarism, no, but the tsar and his nemka wife were dead, along with, sad to say, two of their innocent children. That much was official.
What wasn’t official, but which I believed more than any other word, was that the new tsarina, Tatiana, was duly crowned and promising to end the Red menace, to restore law, to restore the army, and to rule differently than her father.
It was at about this time that I began to hear serious and strenuous rumblings of mutiny against the Reds from the men and especially the soldiers. This was especially true when I went from Moscow to Petrograd to retrieve the medals I’d left for safekeeping. There was no doubt, on that train, that the soldiers had had enough of the Bolsheviks. Whether this was because of the rumors revolving around the new tsarina, or the bungling incompetence of the Reds, along with their greed, viciousness, and venality, I didn’t know. Maybe it was part of both. And yet I heard a lot more detestation of the Bolsheviks than I did adoration of the new tsarina. Still, of adoration and hope there was, in fact, some.
And I thought to myself, How could she be worse than her father or the Reds? I didn’t think it was possible to be worse. And then there were my girls . . . maybe she could help my poor sick and wounded girls.
I sent a telegram to my former adjutant, Princess Tatuyeva, down in Georgia, asking her to assemble whatever she could of the battalion and meet me in Yekaterinburg as soon as possible. Yes, of course with their arms; it’s a rough world out there for an unarmed woman. On the plus side, when the Soviet was talked and threatened out of shooting me, they gave me a free pass to travel where I wanted to, unmolested.
My own thirty sick and wounded didn’t have any of their rifles. How they’d lost all of them didn’t matter at this point. I had my pistol still; it would have to do. With my thirty invalids in tow, plus two of the nurses from Martha and Mary, I set out for Yekaterinburg.
In the back of my mind, too, was an idea the soldiers on the train to Petrograd had planted; if I could only get to America, I mind find aid to help us throw the Reds out of power.