The Romanov Bride

Chapter 20 PAVEL

Back in the small apartment with one window, we poured cheap vodka from a bottle with a red label and drank toast after toast, the brew burning my throat each time I tossed down a shot. Da, da, the Grand Duke was dead!

After her fourth or fifth glass, Dora Brilliant, her eyes glistening with joyful tears and her speech slurred, turned to me, clasped my hand, and said, “Pavel, history has told us that the luxurious tree of freedom needs blood to quicken its roots!”

I looked into her dark eyes, and replied, “What beautiful words.”

“Yes, but it also needs money.”

And that was how, right then and there in the middle of our celebration, we started planning our next murder, that of Fat Yuri the Sugar Baron, whose factories produced most of the sugar in the Empire. He was known, too, for hoarding his gold rubles in his huge mansion in the Arbat District. So that day we made a drunken plan and I, my poor head spinning from the vodka, took another shot of brew and a chomp on a freshly salted gherkin, and swore I could accomplish this one on my own. That was how eager I was to prove my loyalty to the Revolution. And accomplish it I did, within days as a matter of fact. Deep in the night, I climbed over the iron railing of Yuri Mikhailovich’s mansion, broke through a window, and traipsed right through the huge front room with its rotunda ceiling. Then I crept up to the bedroom and shot both Yuri and his fat wife in the head, but not before getting him to hand over a sack full of nearly 10,000 gold rubles!

Inspired by our glorious success, we worked harder than ever in the weeks and months ahead, spreading strikes like wildfire, cutting phone lines and looting stores. And we did it again and again: Murder! Assassination! Governors! Factory bosses! Landowners! Sure, we killed as many as we could, for as our poet Kalyayev himself decreed from prison:

“You have declared war on the people, and we have accepted the challenge!”