Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  The Russians, for their part, had never seen anything quite like Britannia. Nor had they ever seen a reigning monarch. Now, all that was about to change. Like her visit to China eight years earlier, the Queen’s 1994 state visit to meet President Boris Yeltsin was one of the great post-war diplomatic breakthroughs, upending more than seventy years of rigid communist protocol in the process – from flypasts to dress codes. For the first time since the reign of the last Tsar, dinner jackets would be worn at the Kremlin. The sense of happy amazement would be summed up by the Queen in her state banquet address to a beaming Yeltsin: ‘You and I have spent most of our lives believing that this evening could never happen. I hope that you are as delighted as I am to be proved wrong.’ He was indeed.

  This state visit had been under discussion ever since the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had invited the Queen five years earlier. Gorbachev’s programme of perestroika (‘restructuring’) and glasnost (‘openness’) had led to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Iron Curtain around communist Eastern Europe. During the Gorbachev years, Yeltsin had risen to be Mayor of Moscow and the first democratically elected president of Russia, while Gorbachev remained in overall charge of the Soviet Union. Following the attempted coup of 1991, during which Gorbachev was held under house arrest, Yeltsin’s defiance in the face of the plotters won the day. He emerged as the victor. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved within weeks, leaving Yeltsin at the helm in Russia. While speculators, entrepreneurs and criminal gangs embarked on a Wild West-style gold rush among the wreckage of all the old communist state enterprises, Britain was keen to bolster Yeltsin’s democratic reforms. The President, in turn, was keen to show the people that his administration commanded international respect. It was time for the Queen to make that state visit.

  ‘There were plenty of people in the Foreign Office saying that we should wait until they had a “proper” democracy,’ says Sir Brian Fall, Britain’s Ambassador to Moscow at the time. ‘And the bean counters were saying: “No, let’s wait and see if they’ve got a proper economy. Then let’s put them in the royal visits programme.” But that would have been too late. The right decision was to go right then, when it could do some good because people would appreciate it more.’ Sir Brian believes that the Queen and her advisers were of the same view. For this was the period when she has putting forward exactly the same arguments for making a prompt visit to Nelson Mandela’s newly-democratic South Africa – as she would a few months later – regardless of all those advising a more cautious approach. The Nineties might have been pretty miserable for the monarchy on the domestic front. On the world stage, however, the Queen was at the top of her game.

  Before taking over in Moscow, Sir Brian Fall had already been Private Secretary to three Foreign Secretaries, later serving as number two in Washington, before becoming Britain’s High Commissioner to Canada (and receiving the first of his two knighthoods). Having found himself de facto ambassador to ten other countries, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was determined to present the UK as a reliable partner. He could see how important it was to show support for Yeltsin’s shaky free-market democracy in the face of so much turmoil and uncertainty. There was already something of a diplomatic vacuum in Moscow and everything to play for. The Queen and the rest of the Royal Family would be keen to play. Fall would have the rare distinction of organising separate visits for the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, the Princess of Wales and the Princess Royal during his three years in Moscow.

  ‘It was a very exciting time. You really couldn’t see more than two weeks ahead,’ recalls Sir Francis Richards, then number two at the British Embassy. As a result, this would be a seat-of-the-pants state visit, in comparison to the usual planning process for the Queen’s tours. One year before the Queen’s arrival, the Prince of Wales had acted as an advance party to establish the appetite for a full state visit. The Duke of Edinburgh had also visited in a semi-private sporting capacity, as President of the International Equestrian Federation. However, the decision to send the Queen was not made until the summer of 1994. She would be arriving that very autumn. There really was no time to lose.

  In July, Sir Ken Scott, the Queen’s deputy Private Secretary (an old Eastern European hand, having been Ambassador to Yugoslavia) arrived on the customary recce mission.

  The visit would begin with the usual formalities in Moscow and then move on to the great imperial city of St Petersburg, where the Queen would repay President Yeltsin’s hospitality aboard the Royal Yacht. Sir Ken went to see the newly-elected Mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, and his deputy, a former Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB called Vladimir Putin. Much of the discussion revolved around arrangements for Britannia. Sir Ken was delighted to be told that the Yacht would be berthed on the illustrious Embankment of the Red Fleet, on exactly the same spot where the Russian cruiser, Aurora, had fired the first shot of the Russian Revolution. He decided to keep pushing his luck. ‘Before the revolution, of course, it was called the English Embankment,’ he told Messrs Sobchak and Putin. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to call it that again?’ The mayor agreed that it was an excellent idea.

  Getting Britannia to St Petersburg was relatively easy. Getting President Yeltsin on board for the Queen’s return banquet was another matter. Under Soviet-era rules, Russian leaders did not attend return banquets or, indeed, accept foreign hospitality outside the Kremlin. Yet here were the British expecting the President to come all the way to St Petersburg to be fed by the Queen. ‘Getting the top man out of the Kremlin for a return dinner? That hadn’t happened for thirty years,’ says Sir Brian Fall. ‘Getting him to St Petersburg? Unheard of.’ Yet the Russians agreed to it all. Yeltsin might not do it for anyone else, but he would do it for the Queen.

  There would be one or two stumbling blocks. For a visit of this calibre, the Queen had requested that royal Rolls-Royces be sent ahead to both Moscow and St Petersburg (there would be no complaints about the monarch being ferried around in a Mercedes on this trip). The British Embassy arranged for the Moscow model to be displayed in the local Rolls-Royce showroom, until Sir Brian received a complaint from the royal chauffeur. ‘He was wondering if the Ambassador could help him sweep the scantily clad girls off the bonnet,’ he recalls. ‘They were trying to put Miss Moscow on the front!’

  The only notable irritant, as far as the Palace and the FCO were concerned, would occur back in Britain. Jonathan Dimbleby’s new biography of the Prince of Wales, written with the Prince’s help, was being serialised in the days before the visit. As a result, the Prince’s complaints about an unhappy childhood were dominating the front pages of the papers, at a time when both Buckingham Palace and the British government had been hoping to focus on the historic state visit. With that in mind, the Duke of Edinburgh gave an interview to the author for the Daily Telegraph on the eve of the visit. In it, he delivered a thinly veiled message to the Prince – ‘I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has, either’ – before offering an intriguing family perspective on the forthcoming visit.

  For there was an important personal dimension to this trip. When the Bolsheviks executed the Russian imperial family, the Romanovs, in 1918, they were executing the cousins of King George V, the Queen’s grandfather. Many years later it would emerge that it had been the King himself, rather than his ministers, who had refused to offer sanctuary to Tsar Nicholas II. George V had been afraid of risking the contamination of Britain with the Bolshevism that was sweeping the continent.

  The Queen could not possibly visit St Petersburg without visiting the tombs of the tsars at the Peter and Paul Fortress. A space had been reserved there for the imminent interment of the newly identified remains of Nicholas II. Yet this aspect of the visit would be even more personal for the Duke of Edinburgh, whose own family had been intimately connected with the Russian Revolution. The Duke was the great-great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas I and a great-nephew of Tsar Alexander III. The last Russian
sovereign, Tsar Nicholas II had been a guest at the wedding of the Duke’s own parents in 1903 and his boorish behaviour had entered family legend. The Duke’s mother had called Nicholas a ‘stupid donkey’ after he threw a white slipper at her carriage and accidentally hit her in the face. So closely related is the Duke to the tsars that he provided one of the DNA samples that enabled scientists to identify the Romanov remains. Hence he had given this visit a great deal of thought.

  The contrasting fates of the British and Russian monarchies in the early part of the twentieth century, the Duke explained, were down to constitutional evolution. ‘We got over the industrial revolution and the development of an urban industrial intelligentsia reasonably easily. We did because we had a constitutional monarchy,’ he said. ‘He [Nicholas II] was, by constitution, the autocrat.’

  The Duke’s primary interest was in the fate of his great-aunt, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, who had founded an order of nuns in Moscow before being arrested by the Bolsheviks. ‘She was eventually taken and thrown down a mineshaft in Siberia,’ he said. ‘They lobbed some hand grenades on top of her.’†† Her heroism had a profound impact on the Duke’s own mother, Princess Andrew of Greece, who founded her own order of nuns in 1949. As a result, the Duke was keen to visit not only the royal tombs in St Petersburg, but the original site of Elizabeth’s convent in Moscow. He was at pains to stress that he bore no grudges. ‘It was part of family folklore,’ he explained. ‘But I don’t look at this as a family occasion. You can’t condemn a whole nation for what a few extremists do or did.’ He was as keen as his hosts to take a positive, forward-looking approach. ‘We went through this whole drama of the collapse of the Marxist state and now we see the gradual recombining of countries that had been in contact with each other for three or four hundred years on a fairly open basis. There is tremendous potential.’

  That potential was clear the moment the Queen’s BAe 146‡‡ touched down at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport at 4.30 p.m. on Monday 17th October 1994. The BAe 146 might be a modest thirty-seat runaround compared to some presidential airliners, but it was escorted into Moscow by Russian SU-27 jets, which then performed a brilliant display of aerobatics overhead, an honour that had not been given to any visiting head of state since the 1970s.

  The Queen was driven straight to the Kremlin where President Yeltsin and his wife, Naina, had arranged a carefully choreographed handshake in the middle of St George’s Hall, the largest room in the Kremlin. The two couples entered at opposite ends of the 300-foot chamber and met for bracing handshakes halfway, beneath six 400-bulb chandeliers. Much as the British press had been relishing the prospect of a presidential bear hug, Mr Yeltsin appeared to offer a small but respectful bow, before handing the Queen a large bouquet of roses. She seemed more than usually pleased to receive them.

  Those close to the Queen say that she has always had a deep respect for Boris Yeltsin. ‘The Queen took a real shine to Yeltsin. She admired him,’ says Sir Robert Woodard. ‘I think she thought that a man who can control a country this size has to be very special.’

  Less than two hours later, the Queen was expected at the Bolshoi Theatre with the Yeltsins for a performance of Giselle. It is a ballet that has featured more often than most on her travel (not least at Versailles, on her epic 1972 state visit to France). Sir Brian Fall reveals the reason: ‘Giselle is what you put on if you have VIPs – because it’s short.’ More than seventy years of communism had certainly not eroded the Russian appetite for some royal grandeur (or ‘Queen bling’, as one former Private Secretary calls it). Indeed, Embassy staff had pointed out to the Palace that the Russian public were very much expecting a monarch who looked like a monarch at this particular occasion, even if Mr Yeltsin would be attending the ballet in a lounge suit. Every gaze was fixed on what was still known as the ‘Tsar’s Box’, as the Queen made her entry in a silk floral jacket over a long green evening dress, with white gloves, diamonds and tiara. All six tiers of the theatre rose to applaud her and carried on doing so all through the British national anthem. There would be much wearing of mink throughout this visit, too. The animal-rights lobby might have ensured that royal furs were pushed to the back of the cupboard at home, but Russia was expecting nothing less.

  The first evening concluded with a British Embassy reception for a cross-section of Russian life that would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier. ‘There were a lot of unreconstructed people and a lot of liberal ones,’ says Sir Francis Richards, who helped prepare the guest list. ‘But we never encountered any resistance.’ The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and Yelena Bonner, widow of the dissident Andrei Sakharov, were among those invited.

  The following morning, though, would present the Queen with a vivid illustration of the chaos and infighting that bedevilled Russian public life. The plan had been for her to walk across Red Square to visit the mighty onion-domed St Basil’s Cathedral, hear a choir and meet the Russian public. However, one of several competing security forces claiming jurisdiction over the Queen had decided to clear the square of ordinary people in order to ensure her safety. As a result, the only people the Queen and the Duke encountered were the international media and a handful of tourists.

  To make matters worse, the Mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, intervened to redirect the Queen away from St Basil’s to a less interesting part of Red Square. She was shown the decidedly unimpressive Kazan Cathedral, a replica of an old Orthodox church that the mayor had recently rebuilt. ‘There were moments when the whole thing went off-script,’ says one member of the party. ‘The Queen and Yeltsin came down the great staircase while the Great Bell of the Kremlin tolled and immediately this thug, Luzhkov, grabbed her by the arm and took her across Red Square. She was meant to be going to St Basil’s to hear these wonderful singers and Luzhkov had ruined it. She never got to hear the singers.’ Palace officials were incandescent. ‘A complete cock-up,’ one of the press team shouted at his Russian opposite number. ‘She’s here to meet the people, not thin air.’

  The Queen and her host were getting on extremely well, regardless. Before that evening’s state banquet (caviar, salmon in champagne, asparagus soup, chicken supreme and, finally, strawberry parfait) in the Kremlin’s fifteenth-century Faceted Hall, the two leaders exchanged gifts. The Queen gave the president a Spode dinner service decorated with Russian double eagles in gold, and a pair of gold cufflinks. There was also a miniature walnut chest full of seeds for Mrs Yeltsin’s garden. In return, Yeltsin gave the Queen a samovar (still in regular Palace use at teatime) and a bejewelled clock.

  Officials glanced nervously at the President’s glass. It was only three weeks since an excruciating episode during a transatlantic stopover in Ireland. Yeltsin had been supposed to have bilateral talks with the Irish Prime Minister, Albert Reynolds. Having circled inexplicably for an hour, the presidential jet had finally landed at Shannon Airport only for Yeltsin’s deputy to come down the steps. His boss, he explained, would not be getting off the plane as he was ‘very tired’. Yeltsin, on his first outing in a dinner jacket, was determined to be on his best behaviour for the Queen, refusing all drinks at the pre-banquet reception. He confined himself to a vodka at the start, red wine for the toasts and a little Georgian brandy at the end. The President used his speech to salute the Queen as a beacon of stability in an unstable world. ‘In Russia, the Queen is seen as the personification of state wisdom, continuity of history, greatness of the nation,’ he told his guests. ‘Bearing your mission with dignity, Your Majesty, you confirm an important idea: monarchy can be an integral part of a democratic system of government, an embodiment of the spiritual and historic unity of a nation.’

  Yeltsin appeared visibly touched by the Queen’s reply. ‘Times of change are not times of comfort,’ she acknowledged, but she had every faith in his mission. ‘The process of change has brought uncertainty and not all are convinced that this great effort will be rewarded with the success it deserves. I firmly believe it will be.’

 
The programme was unusually brisk, with good reason. ‘You had to see a lot but not spend too long in any one place or someone would discover that some awful thing had happened there,’ says Sir Brian Fall. ‘There were skeletons everywhere.’ One direct result of the state visit was the return of the former St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow to the Church of England. Shut down by the Bolsheviks, it had ended up as a communist recording studio. The Duke of Edinburgh also finally made it to the convent that his heroic great-aunt had founded before her grisly death.

  The Ambassador’s wife, Delmar Fall, had been closely involved in every step of the programme. For the Queen’s lunch at the British Embassy, she decided to set aside protocol and avoid seating everyone according to their embassy rank. Instead, she sat the Queen next to the embassy doctor, Hugh Carpenter, a popular character among Moscow’s British community. ‘He was certainly not someone to be intimidated by who he was sitting next to,’ she recalls. ‘I remember his wife sitting across the room making hand gestures as if to say: “Stop talking so much”. The Queen was very amused and said: “I must try that on Philip some time”. She certainly enjoyed it.’

  Once the royal tour moved on to St Petersburg, there was a marked change in atmosphere. Not only had the main political imperatives been addressed, but the crowds were larger and much more enthusiastic, a reminder of the more European character of the city. At the immense blue-and-white Catherine Palace – the Romanovs’ answer to Versailles, with its Hall of Mirrors and Amber Room – the old imperial flag was flying for the first time anyone could remember. The challenge for the staff of the Hermitage was how best to show off one of the world’s greatest museums in the space of an hour and a quarter. The Queen sidestepped a special exhibition on Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. Diplomats – and the Queen herself – were determined that what was primarily a forward-looking tour should not become a Nicholas II memorial roadshow.