As early as April, rumours had been swirling on this subject among the Romanovs’ royal relatives in Europe. The King and Queen of Sweden had got wind from their envoy in Petrograd, General Edvard Brändström, that the ‘Czar and Czarina in person had been interned in the Peter & Paul Fortress’. ‘His Majesty fears that the royal couple could be murdered or executed,’ Ratibor, the German ambassador to Madrid, reported to Berlin, ‘the situation according to other (British) sources of information is frightful and the most terrible things are to be expected daily.’ The main charges of treason, he noted, were levelled against the Empress, and she faced ‘the full severity of the law’.23
King George had obviously heard similar worrying press reports, for on 4 June he noted in his diary: ‘I fear that if poor Nicky goes into the fortress of St Peter and St Paul he will not come out alive.’24 An article headed ‘Calls for Revenge’ had recently been published in Izvestiya, the mouthpiece of the Petrograd Soviet, reporting on a resolution passed in the Soviet for the transfer of Nicholas to the radical stronghold at Kronstadt. ‘We would like to note that all these resolutions are permeated by one and the same mood – a dissatisfaction with the extremely mild treatment on the part of the victorious revolution of the person who was the bitterest enemy of the people.’25 The Spanish ambassador to Petrograd nervously reported in cipher to Madrid on the ‘ultra-radical political programme’ of the Kronstadters, who refused to recognise the authority of the Provisional Government, demanding that ‘Emperor Nicholas II, his wife and their children are handed to the city of Kronstadt, under threat, or else, they will attack Petrograd’.26
This increase in calls for the trial and imprisonment of Nicholas and Alexandra stemmed from a growing concern that their continued presence near the city posed a threat to the new revolutionary order. They were a reminder of the hated past and of a defunct tsarist regime that the revolution had destroyed. How they were dealt with could tip the delicate balance of the Provisional Government’s power, and it found itself in a cleft stick. To keep the Romanovs at Tsarskoe might incite an attack on the palace by mobs from the city; but then again, to send them abroad might also galvanise the monarchist element, which was even now gathering in Tsarskoe Selo and elsewhere to rally around them and attempt to restore the monarchy. In a word, moving the Romanovs anywhere out of Russia might destabilise a very delicate political situation – and the government, of which Kerensky had become Minister of War in May, now of all times needed to keep the country on an even keel, for it was about to launch a major military push on the Eastern Front.27
* * *
In June, three months of British prevarication finally came to its inevitable, ignominious end when an extremely emotional Sir George Buchanan, ‘with tears in his eyes’, arrived at the Russian Foreign Ministry to see the new Foreign Minister, Mikhail Tereshchenko. Buchanan had at last received a categorical rejection from London. Tereshchenko’s recall concurs entirely with Kerensky’s concerning how distressed Sir George had been to receive ‘the British government’s final refusal to give refuge to the former Emperor of Russia’.28 Kerensky later wrote that he never saw the letter in which the news came, but was told the gist. But he could say ‘quite definitely’ that ‘this refusal was due exclusively to considerations of internal British politics’.
* * *
Until now we have only had Kerensky’s say-so on the final British rejection of asylum for the Romanovs, and no record of the transmission of this directive to Buchanan has turned up in Foreign Office or other British sources. But it did not come from Lloyd George or from Foreign Secretary Balfour: it came from none other than Lord Hardinge, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and a key decision-maker in the issue. I discovered a reference to this crucial document in the papers of Nicolas de Basily, a senior Russian diplomat and minister, held at the Hoover Institution in California.* These papers include a number of folders of eyewitness testimony relating to the Romanovs and the asylum question, gathered by de Basily in exile in the 1920s and 1930s. Buried amongst them is a four-page statement in French made by Mikhail Tereshchenko to de Basily in Paris in April 1934. The letter to Sir George Buchanan was in fact not an official typed and ciphered despatch, but a personal, handwritten letter from Hardinge, who signed it ‘Charlie’. The fact that it was transmitted privately and not via official channels (there being no copy of it in the FO files) suggests that ‘Charlie’ felt the time had come to personally disabuse Sir George, once and for all, of any hopes he still clung to that a Romanov rescue was possible.
* * *
The contents of the Hardinge letter made such a strong impression on Tereshchenko, when Sir George showed it to him, that although Tereshchenko was not able to memorise it word-for-word, he retained a very precise recall of its heavily ironic tone and repeated it to de Basily in his imperfect English thus:
How can the ‘Provisional Government’ expect that His Majesty can be put before the problem of giving asile [exile] to his Cousin, when the only way to explain the present strange policy of the Provisional Government is that it seeks to impress on the world’s public opinion, that it endeavours to re-establish in Russia a national Russian policy, as against the pro-German tendency of the former Tsar. You cannot expect the members of His Majesty’s Government to put the King’s feelings of affection towards his cousin to such a test.29*
In his own account, Kerensky confirmed that the content of the letter received by Buchanan inferred that the British Prime Minister could hardly advise King George to ‘offer hospitality to people whose pro-German sympathies were well known’.30 Tereshchenko agreed: the final British refusal was a damning admission of the still-persisting British mistrust of the Tsar and Tsaritsa as German sympathisers. To receive them in Britain, in time of war against Germany, was something the government was no longer willing to risk. This final rejection appears to have been passed on to Sir George without any further reference back to the King himself. In London, Lloyd George was privately relieved. He was, he admitted in a note to Hardinge, glad that the ‘idea of asylum was dropped as it would have been used by Germans’.31 Indeed, it had also been made clear to Sir George by now that such was the deepening official intransigence in the matter, London would refuse to take in any members of the Russian Imperial Family until after the war was over. After months of lobbying on behalf of the former Tsar, Sir George Buchanan was finally forced to capitulate. The elusive ‘English mirage’ (as White Russians in exile later came to refer to the aborted British asylum offer) vanished over the horizon.32
What now for the Romanovs, still prisoners at Tsarskoe Selo and still hoping for a resolution? When Kerensky arrived at the Alexander Palace soon afterwards to fulfil his ‘thankless task of telling the former Tsar of this new development’, Nicholas ‘took the news calmly and expressed his wish to go to the Crimea instead’.33
One of the most dispiriting aspects of the Romanov asylum issue in 1917 is a total lack of coordination between the various interested parties who might, had they acted in unison, have collectively been able to effect the family’s safe evacuation from Russia. Although the governments of Germany and Britain were enemies in the war, it is clear that the Danish royal family were willing to facilitate a solution with their cooperation. Certainly Harald Scavenius, the Danish ambassador in Petrograd, working in tandem with his cousin Erik, who was Danish Foreign Minister, had been called upon to approach the Germans and obtain from them a promise that their submarines would not attack any British ship taking the Romanovs out on a white flag.34 With the current war footing between Entente and Allied forces, all Germany could do would be to undertake not to stand in the way of any evacuation. Tereshchenko’s subsequent secret request to the Kaiser received a highly stilted but official answer, sent via the Danes, a few days later:
The Imperial government considers it a duty to guarantee that not a single naval unit of the German military-naval fleet would venture to make an attack on any kind of vessel, on the deck of which
the Russian Emperor and His Family are being conveyed.35
* * *
With this undertaking, the Germans had thus, effectively, fulfilled their obligation to assist the Russian monarch on humanitarian grounds.36 Unfortunately, the historian faces yet another closed door in trying to uncover documentation on Danish initiatives. According to information given to me by Danish scholar Bernadette Preben Hansen, who has been engaged in an exhaustive study of Harald Scavenius, the Danish Royal Archives for this period are ‘hermetically closed’ to historical research. She tells me that although there are many hints about a desire to get the Romanovs out of Russia to be found in the archives of the Danish Foreign Ministry and in the records of the Danish Embassy in Petrograd, there has as yet been no systematic, scholarly study of any of these sources. When authors Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold applied for access to the Danish Royal Archives during their research for the 1987 second edition of their book File on the Tsar, they were given short shrift. Word came back from the Danish queen that ‘It is a family matter, and nobody else’s business.’37 Other Romanov scholars have confirmed similar experiences to me, when trying to access material on the Danish royals at this time. There is also surprisingly little, if any, obvious material on British relations with Denmark and the Danish Crown in the British Foreign Office files at the National Archives during this period, and nothing referring directly to the Romanovs.
But what about the other Scandinavian monarchs?
On 29 May, British envoy to the King of Sweden, Sir Esmé Howard, reported that the Russian ambassador, Anatoly Neklyudov, had suggested to him that if the family’s lives were in danger, ‘it might be possible to get them off in a British submarine when they could be met by Swedish destroyers and brought to Sweden in safety. He said he was sure that the King of Sweden would do everything in his power to secure their safety.’ Neklyudov had apparently begged Major-General Hanbury-Williams to ‘submit this plan to The King, when he returned to London’. But Hanbury-Williams and Howard had agreed that it was ‘quite impracticable’, not to mention ‘most impolitic and inopportune from many points of view’. It all boiled down to the same old problem:
The Russian Imperial Family, if they come to Sweden, would almost certainly become the centre of German intrigue. Only in [the] case of Russia’s falling into the hands of the extreme Anarchist party [i.e. the Bolsheviks] who are willing to treat with Germany anyhow, does it seem to me that such an arrangement would no longer be open to any objections, and it would then probably be too late to do anything, even if it is not too late already.38
Whether or not the King of Sweden ever had any thoughts of sending a ship remains a mystery, although in 1987 Summers and Mangold claimed that ‘British official papers show that King Gustav of Sweden … offered a Swedish submarine for a proposed naval operation to take the Romanovs to safety.’39 They further state that in response to this, Lord Hardinge at the FO noted on a file that this Swedish initiative was a typical example of the ‘Trust of Kings’ – or, as King Edward VII had referred to it, ‘The Kings’ Trade Union’ – the closed world of royal freemasonry that operated independently of governments. Unfortunately, the Swedish Royal Archives are no more open to scrutiny than the Danish ones. The Swedish king, Gustav, was coping with his own internal crisis in 1917, during which time three successive governments fell as a result of rationing and famine brought on by the Allied blockade. Gustav found himself facing hunger demonstrations and worker unrest, encouraged by left-wing sympathy for events in Russia, and, like King George and King Alfonso, had begun to fear for the safety of his own throne, so much so that it is said he had his suitcases packed and ready, should revolution break out and it be necessary for him to flee.
In the midst of continuing rumours of attempts at diplomatic intervention, ambassador Neklyudov once more found himself drawn into the Romanov issue when at the end of June 1917 he arrived in Madrid to take up a new appointment to Spain. On 2 July he processed in a gilded coach, complete with liveried postilions, to the Royal Palace at the Escorial for a lavish reception at which he was to present his credentials to the King. After approaching Alfonso, who sat resplendent on the throne flanked by life-sized gilded lions, Neklyudov discovered that all the grandees of the Spanish court had turned out to witness ‘a Muscovite revolutionary’ being presented to the King, but were somewhat disappointed to see the ambassador of the Provisional Government dressed in traditional, heavily embroidered imperial garb.40 After Neklyudov had read out his speech in which, among other things, he lauded the King’s humanitarian work for Russian prisoners of war, Alfonso seemed eager to have a private word and drew him aside, out of earshot of the surrounding dignitaries:
Monsieur, in your speech you were good enough to allude to the help we have been able to render to your prisoners. Allow me to tell you of the deep interest I take in the fate of other ‘Russian prisoners’. I allude to His Majesty the former Emperor Nicholas II and his family. I come to beg you, Monsieur, to transmit to your Government my fervent prayers for their liberation.41
Who was the official head of the Provisional Government, asked Alfonso? He wanted to ensure that his appeal went to the most senior person. President of the Council of Ministers, Prince Lvov, Neklyudov responded. He was a man who, despite the overthrow of the tsarist regime, he assured the King, still held great feelings of sympathy and loyalty towards the Tsar. Neklyudov would not hesitate to ‘transmit to my Government the words that Your Majesty has just spoken’. ‘You can be assured,’ he continued, ‘that while the present government is in power, not a hair will fall from the former tsar’s head.’ But he also warned Alfonso that although it was indeed the Provisional Government’s one wish to ‘allow the Emperor and his family to leave for foreign parts; if it does not do so, it is on account of the extreme elements’.42 Moreover, any attempts at intercession by foreign governments, or special pleading on behalf of the Imperial Family, would only inflame an already difficult situation. For this reason Neklyudov did not recommend an official petition by the Spanish king to the government; he would instead convey Alfonso’s words to Prince Lvov, not by official telegram, but by private letter.43 True to his word, Neklyudovwrote to Prince Lvov on 3 July, communicating the King’s personal and heartfelt plea for the government to ensure the safety of the ‘first citizen of Russia, now overthrown and incarcerated’, and of his family also.44
Once again, King Alfonso was the only European royal to make any kind of direct, impassioned appeal on behalf of the Romanovs. But Neklyudov had been right to express the need for caution: for if the truth be known, even the Provisional Government was now changing its position and was not inclined, for reasons of realpolitik, to push the issue of asylum any more. For by the summer of 1917 the government was facing not just looming catastrophe on the Eastern Front, but also a serious challenge from the Bolsheviks, who had been gaining ground since the return to Russia of their leader, Lenin, in early April.
In Petrograd on 16 July, disturbances erupted among groups of disgruntled workers and soldiers eager to foment public discontent in the wake of the failure of the latest Russian offensive in the war. After coming out onto the streets, they encouraged others to go on strike and join in their demonstrations, in the hope that this would trigger a second revolution and the Petrograd Soviet’s takeover of government. The protests soon turned ugly and degenerated into armed clashes. There was talk of the insurgents heading for Tsarskoe Selo with armoured cars ‘and tear[ing] away from the Provisional Government the Emperor and all his family’.45
The Bolsheviks in the Soviet, however, although now in the majority, had not been prepared for this sudden turn of events, and their leaders were hesitant about whether it was the opportune moment to seize power. The threat of insurrection fizzled out and instead several of the Bolshevik leaders, including Trotsky, were rounded up and put in jail, while Lenin fled to the safety of Finland. The Bolsheviks were further discredited when the Provisional Government produced evidence that Lenin and
his colleagues had been in collusion with the Germans and were receiving financial assistance from them.
On 20 July, the day the violence in Petrograd subsided, a weary Prince Lvov – who had increasingly found himself at odds with his own government, let alone the Petrograd Soviet – stood down as Prime Minister. Kerensky succeeded him and assumed full control of the fate of the Romanovs. With the Bolsheviks for the time being in retreat, the Provisional Government had the upper hand, including better control of the railways. For all too brief a time, an opportunity presented itself for getting the Romanovs if not out of Russia, then at the least – in the words of Hanbury-Williams – ‘as far as possible from the seat of everlasting trouble – Petrograd’.46
With the Imperial Family’s continuing presence there, ‘Tsarskoe Selo was becoming the tender spot of the body politic’, admitted Kerensky, and he had to move quickly. On Sunday, 24 July, he drove out to the Alexander Palace and informed Nicholas that the family needed to be moved south to a quieter, more remote location, ‘due to the proximity of Tsarskoe Selo to the restless capital’.47 He was vague about where exactly he was thinking of sending them, but it was evident that he feared that sooner or later there might be an attack on the palace and an attempt to take Nicholas and Alexandra away to prison, or worse. His decision to evacuate was prompted not just by the recent disturbances in the city, but also by a growing awareness of the activities of ‘amateur monarchist plotters’, whom Kerensky noted had been sending the Tsaritsa ‘mysterious little notes’ hinting at ‘prompt liberation’. ‘Inexperience and childish simplicity were intertwined with mockery and treachery,’ he recalled; the garrison at Tsarskoe had ‘become unsettled by talk of conspiracies, of attempts to free the Tsar’. Word was reaching him, too, about growing right-wing anti-government resentment in the army. Kerensky needed to act.48
The Race to Save the Romanovs Page 13