The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Autumn 1899. A group of us recent cadets was traveling northward via the recently opened railway through Baku, Petrovsk and Rostov-on-the-Don. Tbilisi and the best part of my life was left behind in the sweet-smelling clouds of Tbilisi dust. The beauty of the Georgian Military Highway. Vladikavkaz. The railway. Finally, Russian cities. We take in Russia with great curiosity. What is she like? How will she reveal herself? And we had a jealous, protective sense toward “our” Caucasus which was not “Russia” at all.

St. Petersburg—a totally different place. It seemed cold, dark, and dank. The city had a powerful effect on me. It was a typical, gray St. Petersburg short day. Icy mist covered the ruler-straight streets, so unusual to our Tbilisi eyes. In the city-center the noiseless streets were paved with wood blocks. They gave off a fine smell of pitch which was used to bind them to the base pavement. This was a totally different environment and totally different people. The center was filled with civil service types and the military. Simple folk

Oleg Pantiukhov, A Student’s Summer

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were found on the periphery wearing old-fashioned full-length overcoats, cloaks, and caftans. I especially recall the street vendors selling juicy and tasty plums. The vendors wore white aprons and carried their trays on their heads. Near Haymarket Square and Apraksin Market there were many merchants’ wives in colorful old-style broad capes and shawls typical of their social class. I managed to discern all this much later. My first task was to find my way to the Pavlov Military Academy.

The academy turned out to be located in the boonies of St. Pete and was totally different from the Alexander Academy in Moscow. It was a gloomy, gray barracks and not even ancient. Inside, it did not have the expected high-ceilinged halls and its corridors and rooms were low as well. It smelled of wax which was used to robustly polish the parquet floors which were the sole decoration of the place.

My first impression of the cadet corps was negative as well. What had I gotten into? Would I ever come to like this place? My thoughts flew homeward to my friends, Voznesenskii Street, and my parents who were left all alone.

The severe military training of the academy after my independent trip to Switzerland and after my unfettered life in our Tbilisi was hard. I was very homesick. There was the friendship with the contingent from our old school. There were some twenty of us here, if you counted all the classes. Meleshko, Boreisha, and Sasko were Tbilisi alums who were in His Majesty’s Company because of their height. The Tbilisi contingent, just as all the other cadet schools, had their own table in the tea hall. We would gather there as at a club during the intermission between day and evening classes to talk of our affairs and recall Tbilisi. Prices in the tea hall were low, but if there was no money for rolls we simply drank tea with sugar.

At tea we gave each other friendly advice and shared information about the city: which horse cars or trolleys to take when you had a pass. We talked of our instructors and company commanders, but the most valuable were our shared memories of Tbilisi which kept up our spirits. Whenever someone received delicacies from home he, of course, shared them with the rest. A Siberian fellow named Makeev attached himself to our group. We immediately took him in and gave him the nickname of “walrus,” which is what we kintos called all Siberians. [Kinto, meaning comic street entertainer/musician, was widely used in the Caucasus as a term either of endearment or mockery.] Homesickness for our distant lands brought us together. We would walk around the academy quadrangle and talk of the past and the future. The present, the barracks present, would go by very quickly. And, in fact, it did not just go by, it flew.

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Chapter Four

One brutally cold day of minus fourteen degrees or so, [five degrees Fahrenheit] the whole academy went to the funeral of General Rikachev, a one-time commandant of the academy. We marched along crowded streets with passersby carefully examining us. What did they think of us, future officers? Were they in sympathy or in opposition along with the majority of the “intelligentsia?” There was music, then a rifle salute. This was all new to us and we felt ourselves to be adults. Our fingers nearly froze and our shoulders and arms were extremely tired. But as always, fatigue provided satisfaction.

There was a momentous event at the Feast of the Epiphany. His Majesty’s Company took part in a religious procession at the Winter Palace, and we saw, for the first time, the Sovereign Emperor and the Autocrat of all the Russias.