The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  The evacuation of the Dowager and her relatives had been an obvious – and no doubt necessary – cathartic act of redemption on George’s part, to compensate for his failure to save his Romanov relatives.5* But the painful reminders continued to haunt him, even as Dagmar arrived in Britain. On 11 April 1919, he received a despatch from Colonel D. S. Robertson, acting British High Commissioner in Siberia based in Vladivostok, enclosing a preliminary report on the murders. Lord Stamfordham wrote to the Foreign Office that the King had read it ‘with horror’; he was adamant that ‘His Majesty would much prefer that nothing of this account be published.’6 Stamfordham reiterated this on the front cover of the relevant FO file – entitled ‘Murder of the Ex-Czar’ – that was circulated to him. ‘HM prefers that nothing should be published.’7 And indeed none of this was made public, although the relevant FO file was later made accessible to researchers for consultation at the National Archives.

  In contrast, former Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky had no compunction about publishing a series of self-exculpatory accounts in the years after the war. The most widely circulated was his apologia ‘Why the Tsar Never Came to England’, published in the Evening Standard in July 1932, but as early as 1921 Kerensky had sought to explain in the émigré Russian press what went on behind the scenes of his own and Milyukov’s attempts to get the Romanovs out of Russia. This greatly incensed the British government’s mouthpiece, the Daily Telegraph. Blaming Kerensky for his ‘futile attempts at statesmanship’, which handed power to the Bolsheviks, the paper accused him in 1921 of insinuating that the British government was ‘entirely to blame’ for the tragic end of the Imperial Family. The paper rightly pointed out that:

  There is absolutely no proof that Kerensky, in the event of a favourable answer, would have been able to get his prisoners over the border without imperiling their lives … In 1917 the German submarines had become most deadly, and had sunk several ships around Murmansk. This alone would have been reason enough for a desire to delay the crossing of the Imperial captives.

  It was the ‘pusillanimity of Kerensky and his colleagues in dealing with the Bolsheviki’ that had been the ‘real cause of the Ekaterinburg murders’.8 Kerensky retaliated by accusing the Allied governments of a ‘game of duplicity’ played against his own government; the Telegraph had attempted to ‘soften down the categorical nature of the [British] refusal’ to facilitate and provide safe asylum, when by June 1917 it had completely reversed its original offer.9 In the end, however, as even Kerensky conceded, ‘even if the Provisional Government had wanted to remove the former Tsar abroad, it would not have been able to do so, because the Council [Petrograd Soviet] would not have allowed it’. During the lull of July, however, when the Bolsheviks had been discredited and were in retreat, ‘it became quite possible to remove Nikolas II from Tsarskoye-Selo’, and he had done so. Technically, the Tsar’s evacuation north to the Finnish border and out on a British ship, Kerensky now claimed, ‘would have been no more difficult than his journey to Tobolsk’.10 He was backed up in this by Milyukov, and would repeat his claims in numerous articles in the émigré press for the next fifteen years or more, at all times denying any responsibility in the failed asylum initiative.11 The publication of his memoirs – The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution – in London and New York in 1927 aroused another storm of indignation and protest, this time from the Foreign Office.12

  Inevitably, during the 1920s and 1930s, a succession of political and private memoirs of the last days of imperial Russia followed in quick succession. In 1921, after serving as ambassador for a final two years in Rome, Sir George Buchanan retired and began work on an account of his seven-year service in Russia. He was assisted in the task by the author and literary editor Edmund Gosse, and destroyed all his papers on completing it; in 1923, the two-volume My Mission to Russia was published in London.

  Throughout the compilation of these memoirs Buchanan was under considerable Foreign Office pressure not to reveal anything that exposed it, the King or his government to undue criticism. Indeed, Diplomatic Service Regulation no. 20 insisted that the Foreign Secretary would have to give permission with regard to any classified information that was obtained in a diplomat’s official capacity and used in a subsequent memoir. Thus Buchanan’s ability to speak freely about what went on behind the scenes of the Romanov asylum was severely curtailed.13 In her later book, The Dissolution of an Empire, his daughter Meriel revealed how her father was pressurised into covering up details of the King’s change of heart and of giving ‘a rather ambiguous and misleading account of the facts’.14 According to her, Sir George was ‘told at the Foreign Office, where he had gone to examine some of the documents’, that if he did publish the truth:

  he would not only be charged with an Infringement of the Official Secrets Act, but would have his pension stopped … The account he gives of the promise of the British Government to receive the Emperor in England … is therefore a deliberate attempt to suppress the true facts.15

  To make matters worse, in 1923 – shortly before his memoirs were published – Sir George was forced to respond to malicious accusations made against him in the serialisation of Princess Paley’s Souvenirs de Russie in the Revue de Paris.16 Paley, the morganatic second wife of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, was one of Sir George’s most vocal critics. She nursed a deep-seated antipathy towards the British ambassador as having somehow had a hand in fomenting the February Revolution and, with it, the downfall of the Tsar. Her vitriolic accusations that he had personally betrayed the Romanovs came perilously close to libel. But Sir George’s ‘guilt by default’, as alleged by Paley, was sadly a view shared by Pierre Gilliard and some other members of the Russian aristocracy.17 He was also accused of having failed to secure the evacuation out of Russia of Grand Duke Kirill and his wife, Victoria Melita – a granddaughter of Queen Victoria – with whom he and his wife had been friends.18 In truth, Sir George had found himself in a very difficult position at the time, forced to consider the safety of his own family in revolutionary Petrograd and also mindful of the threat to his embassy if he did not cut off his friendship with the Kirills.

  In response to Princess Paley’s allegations, Sir George published an extended extract from his forthcoming memoirs in the same Revue, under the heading ‘Nicolas II et la Révolution Bolcheviste’, adding a qualifier, clearly made under duress, exonerating both Milyukov’s and his own governments:

  I did not call in question the good faith of the Provisional Government … it was they who took the initiative in the matter by asking us to offer the Emperor and his family an asylum in England … Our offer remained open and was never withdrawn. If advantage was not taken of it, it was because the Provisional Government failed to overcome the opposition of the Soviet. They were not, as I asserted and as I repeat, masters in their own house.19

  When Buchanan’s extract was published, Milyukov protested at this closing statement. The controversy did not die down: Paley reasserted her insinuations about Sir George’s ‘nefarious’ dealings over the Romanovs, in a response published again in the Revue de Paris on 15 April 1923.20 Unfortunately, she overreached herself this time, claiming that Sir George had deliberately withheld George V’s telegram of support sent to Nicholas II shortly after his abdication. The King, she insisted, had personally telegraphed Nicholas, ‘urging him to come as soon as possible to England, where he and his family would find a sure and peaceful retreat’.21

  It is interesting to note how long this particular misapprehension – that King George had freely and openly offered asylum to the Romanovs – persisted. The accusation against Sir George was, as Meriel Buchanan wrote, all part of ‘that old but persistent rumour that my father never tried to save the Imperial Family’, and moreover that he did so ‘deliberately, and with intent’. Writing in Dissolution of an Empire in 1932, she hoped that some day ‘somebody will publish the true story of those proceedings, backed by documentary proof in the official archives�
�.22

  But back in 1922–3, Paley’s ill-conceived attack, and Buchanan’s dignified but hamstrung self-defence, took its toll on the ambassador’s already-failing health. He died a year after publishing his memoirs, his name and his reputation sullied. His daughter carried the torch of his defence against the ‘hurtful’ rumours with an energetic militancy over the next thirty years, through her own memoirs and various magazine articles. Sir George’s editor, Edmund Gosse, congratulated Meriel on having done so in her book Diplomacy and Foreign Courts, published in 1928, recalling that Sir George had ‘talked to me much and often of those terrible last months in Russia’ when they had worked together on his memoirs.23 Long after her father’s death, Meriel was still repeatedly asked whether her father could not have ‘done something to get the Emperor and family out of Russia?’24 Finally, in her autobiography of 1958, Ambassador’s Daughter, she was at least able to publish in full the telegram sent by her father on 22 March 1917 to the Foreign Office, relating how Milyukov had told Sir George how anxious he was to ‘get the Emperor of Russia out as soon as possible’ and how, in response, Sir George had urged the Foreign Office that ‘the Emperor should leave before the agitation has time to grow’, and asking for the government’s authority ‘without delay to offer His Majesty asylum in England [my italics]’.25 What more could Buchanan, as ambassador, have done?

  Despite her best efforts, Meriel Buchanan was forced to admit that her defence of her father’s reputation had been hampered throughout by lack of access to the official records. She had therefore written her accounts ‘from my own personal recollections and from impressions left on my mind by my father’s actual words and actions’.26 The problem was compounded, she claimed, by the fact that, with regard to the official record, in 1917–18 Lloyd George:

  had a habit of sending telegrams direct [my italics] to the various Embassies, and not through the usual source of the FO, so that in the official archives there is nothing to show that he was directly instrumental in preventing the Emperor being given sanctuary in England.27

  This is an important point, which might explain some of the presumed ‘absence of evidence’ that perhaps has sent commentators down false trails in this story.

  Nevertheless, publication of Meriel Buchanan’s Dissolution of an Empire in the summer of 1932 aroused considerable press interest and inevitable questions were asked of David Lloyd George. What was his recall of the Romanov asylum affair? His response was vague and evasive; a statement was released through his secretary that the former Prime Minister (who had fallen from power in October 1922) had:

  no clear recollection of what happened at the time but that ‘if the question of allowing the Tsar to come here did arise he probably did advise against it, because at that time we were trying to persuade Kerensky to go on fighting for the Allies, and to have allowed the Tsar to come here would have prejudiced the representations we were making to Kerensky’.28

  As such, this was a retrospective admission that behind the scenes David Lloyd George had no more wanted the Romanovs to come to England than his king had. With the King’s reputation under close and unassailable guard, the finger of blame was therefore inevitably redirected at him. Officialdom was aware, but was keeping quiet: ‘I understand that Mr Lloyd George was not responsible for the decision,’ noted a senior Foreign Office official, ‘but that it is not expedient to say who was.’29

  Two years later, when Lloyd George was busy writing up the 1917–18 period of his six-volume War Memoirs, it was his turn to experience at first hand the extent of the continuing government hush-up.

  * * *

  Until now, discussion of the Lloyd George memoirs relating to the Romanov asylum has had little to say beyond a bald statement of the fact that he was prevailed upon to remove an entire chapter relating to the matter, in order to protect the King’s reputation. The assumption has always seemed to be that the typescript of that redacted chapter had been destroyed. It was not; it survives in the Parliamentary Archives at Westminster. I found it there, after some searching, thanks to a brief discussion of it by a former Foreign Office official, Keith Hamilton, in a 2013 collection of academic essays.30The chapter itself is entirely plodding and unremarkable, but it is the comments pencilled in the margin by the officials who vetted it that are revealing. As is so often the case, the real story is to be found in the marginalia – in what was left unsaid or removed from the record – and it was exciting to receive a copy of this important piece of evidence.

  * * *

  When drafting his chapter entitled ‘Czar’s Future Residence’, Lloyd George enquired about the extent to which he could quote from official documents, for he knew that it would be closely scrutinised. It was, in fact, the responsibility of Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey to go through the chapter with a fine toothcomb. After adding his own comments in the margin in pencil, Hankey passed the chapter on to Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, who did likewise. Even though the chapter itself is little more than a chronological résumé of the facts, quoting official telegrams and letters, it was enough to alarm them both for, despite its blandness, it nevertheless implied that the King had had a direct role in the British change of heart.

  Hankey was, in particular, concerned that the text showed a clear change in the government’s position between the meeting of the War Cabinet on 21 March 1917 when doubt was expressed as to the suitability of Great Britain being the ‘right place to go’, and the meeting held by the larger Imperial War Cabinet (including representatives of the Dominions) on 22 March, when ‘we admittedly changed our mind’ and decided to offer asylum, but only for the duration of the war. Opponents would ‘fasten on that point and will say that the grounds were not strong enough [to renege on this asylum offer at a later date] and that we were not very courageous.’31 Objection was also raised to the inclusion of Buchanan’s ‘pitiless’ comment in his 2 April letter to Balfour, in which he spoke of the Tsaritsa having been ‘the Emperor’s evil genius ever since they married’ – ‘which rather overstates the case and therefore weakens it’.32 Of greatest concern, however, was Lloyd George’s assertion that there was:

  a strong feeling hostile to the Czar in certain working class circles in this country, and that articles tending to associate the King with the Czar had appeared in the Press [my italics]; it was felt that if the Czar should take up his residence here, there was a danger that these tendencies might be stimulated and accented.33

  Hankey and Vansittart immediately took exception to the phrase above in italics: these words ‘must be omitted’. Overall, they felt that the chapter demonstrated an embarrassing weakening of the King and his government’s position, if not downright timidity on their part – ‘not very courageous’ being a damning admission of their collective lack of will. The telegram to Sir George of 13 April explaining the ‘considerable anti-monarchical movement’ developing in Britain also had to go; as, too, did Lloyd George’s quotation of Buchanan’s reluctant agreement that ‘it would be far better that the ex-Emperor should not come to England’ and that France should be approached instead.34 This information would ‘carry little conviction to the public now, who will not readily believe that there was any real danger to the throne here, and will of course fasten on the obvious point that we confessedly tried to pass the responsibility and risk – if any – to France!’35 Yes, conceded one of the notes in the margin: ‘we admittedly changed our own minds. That is what the accusers say. Will they think the grounds strong enough? I feel sure of the contrary – at this stage.’36

  After consultation with others in the Cabinet Office, the consensus was that the whole chapter – seven pages of typescript – should be suppressed, in the belief that George V would object to it. Lloyd George was irritated by the news; the court, he noted, seemed ‘very jumpy and nervy’.37 Two months later he removed the chapter and wrote a new one, omitting all reference to the King and stating that ‘The invitation [to come to England] was not withdr
awn.’ The ultimate decision in the matter, he instead insisted, came from the Russian government, ‘which continued to place obstacles in the way of the Czar’s departure’.38

  It was not until the 1975 publication of the diary of Lloyd George’s private secretary, A. J. Sylvester, that further clarification on the subject was made public, with the entry for 26 June 1934:

  LG has decided to write another chapter about the Tsar. The other one has been scrapped because of objections to it from Hankey, Baldwin and the Court. The new material is not to refer to the movements which were regarded as anti-monarchical in this country.39

  In the end, it was the King’s assistant private secretary, Sir Clive Wigram, who turned the screw on Lloyd George. To further distance the King’s role in the whole ignominious affair and cover up the lack of British resolve, Lloyd George therefore concluded in his published version that:

  the fact is that at no time between his abdication and his murder was [Nicholas II] free to leave Russia. An invitation to take refuge here was extended by the British Crown and Government. The Czar was unable in the event to avail himself of it, even had he been anxious to do so – and of that we had no evidence.40