The Kirilov Star

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Countess Anna Yurievna Kirillova was weeping. Mikhail, her beloved husband of thirteen years, was sending her away and she could not bear it. She was weeping so copiously she could not see to thread her needle. She wept for a comfortable life that had been swept away, for her husband and her children, for the state of her once-elegant home, for a future which terrified her, for Russia. A petite woman in her mid-thirties, she had a fragile beauty which her husband was afraid would never stand up to the harshness of the new regime; she was an innocent, passing from the care of her father to the care of her husband and, until the Revolution, she had never known want or fear, had never had to lift a finger, not even to dress herself. Now there was nothing but fear.

‘Let us stay here, Misha,’ she begged for the hundredth time. ‘We will be all right here. No one will trouble us, surely? We have already given up our home in St Petersburg, isn’t that enough?’ She had forgotten, or refused to acknowledge, that the city was now called Petrograd.

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