(2 of 4)
"This, Madam," said the imperial ghost, "is no strange place to me. It is our former estate of Livadia. Allow me to cite the Intourist's Pocket Guide to the Soviet Union: 'This estate occupies 350 hectares of land, and includes a large park, two palaces and many vineyards. The newer palace [you are standing on its roof], built in 1911 by Krasnov in the style of the Italian Renaissance, is of white Inkerman stone, and contains nearly a hundred rooms.
It has now been changed into a sanatorium for sick peasants, although certain of the rooms have been reserved as a museum. . . . " 'From the alleyways of the Livadian Park. . . .' " Here the Tsarina cut her husband short with a stamp of her ghostly foot.
"Don't hedge, Nicky," she cried. "He never could come to the point. He's trying to cover up the fact that he wanted to eavesdrop on the Big Three Conference.
He doesn't like to admit it in front of the Tsarevich," she added in a stage whisper, "but His Imperial Majesty is simply fascinated by Stalin—mais tout a fait epris!"
"Stalin! You?" gasped the Muse of History.
"Yes, yes, oh yes," said the Tsar eagerly, elbowing his wife's ghost out of the way.
"What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!"
"It all began," said the Tsarina wearily, "with the German-Russian partition of Poland. . . ."
"I always wanted to take those Poles down a peg," the Tsar broke in, "but something was always tying my hands."
"Until then," the Tsarina went on, "we enjoyed a pleasant, if rather insubstantial, life. We used to haunt the Casino at Monte Carlo. But after the partition of Poland, Nicky insisted on returning to Russia. He began to attend the meetings of the Politburo. The Politburo! Oh, those interminable speeches. . . . Ah, Katorga!"
"Couldn't you stay home?" asked the Muse of History.
"And leave Nicky alone with those sharpers! He never could do anything without me. Besides, I doubt if you know what it's like to be a ghost: le silence éternel de ces espaces in finis m'effraie—The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. Pascal said that, you know. Not bad for a man who had never been liquidated. And then," the Tsarina added, "Stalin overran Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania."
"Bessarabia," cried the Tsar, "was recovered from Rumania."
"And Northern Bukovina," cried the Tsarina, "which had never been Russian before."
"Foreign Minister Saracoglu of Turkey was summoned to Moscow," said the Tsar, "and taken over the jumps. For a moment I thought we had the Straits."
"Constantinople," breathed the Tsarina, "the goal of 200 years of Russian diplomacy."
"After that," said the Tsar, "it could not be put off any longer."
"What?" asked the Muse of History.
"Why, my conversion," said the Tsar. "I—I became a Marxist."