The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II
Donald Crawford
An historical biography of the last Tsar of Russia — not Nicholas II, but his brother Michael — Emperor Michael II — who succeeded to the throne when Nicholas abdicated in March 1917. Michael, married to a double divorcée, Natasha, the daughter of a Moscow lawyer, was the first Romanov murdered by the Bolsheviks, five weeks before the other mass killings, and because he was the Romanov who posed the greatest threat to them. However, they never admitted responsibility for his murder, pretending instead that he had escaped.
This book, based chiefly on original contemporary sources in Russia, tells you what the Soviet Union intended that you should never know. Does that matter now? Very much so, for unlike his brother Nicholas, Michael can serve as the bridge between today’s Russia and Tsarist Russia, a gap which has yet to be closed. As Viktor Yevtukhov, appointed deputy Russian Minister of Justice in February 2011, has said: ‘We should know more about this man and remember him, because this memory can give our society the ethical foundation we need’.
This book will tell you why, after almost a century, that should be so. From the tragedy of the past, a hope for the future…
www.lasttsar.com
Donald Crawford
THE LAST TSAR
EMPEROR MICHAEL II
The man Soviet Russia hid from history
The war and all the great horror it involves cannot help inspiring sadness in every sensible person; for example, I feel greatly embittered… and most of all towards those who are at the top, who hold power and allow all that horror to happen. If the question of war were decided by the people at large, I would not be so passionately averse to that great calamity; but… nobody ever asks the nation, the country at large, what course of action they would choose.
Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, from the front line to his wife Natasha, January 22, 1915
I am deeply concerned and worried by what is happening around us. There has been a shocking alteration in the mood of the most loyal people…the public hatred for certain people who allegedly are close to you and who are forming part of the present government… and this hatred, along with demands for changes, are already openly expressed at every opportunity… I have come to the conviction that we are standing on a volcano and that the least spark, the least incorrect step could provoke a catastrophe for you, for us all, and for Russia…I cannot help feeling that if anything happens inside Russia, it will be echoed with a catastrophe as regards the war.
Grand Duke Michael, in a warning letter to his brother Nicholas II, November 11, 1916
To His Majesty the Emperor Michael: Recent events have forced me to decide irrevocably to take this extreme step. Forgive me if it grieves you and also for no warning — there was no time. Shall always remain a faithful and devoted brother. Now returning to HQ where hope to come back shortly to Tsarskoe Selo. Fervently pray God to help you and our country. Your Nicky.
Telegram from ex-Tsar Nicholas II to his brother after abdicating in his favour, March 3, 1917
“We should know about this man and remember him, because this memory can give our society the ethical foundation we need”
— Victor Yevtukhov, Russian deputy minister of justice, 2011.
“A ground-breaking work. There is no figure in modern Russian history that can better serve as a bridge from Russia of the old to a new Russia than Mikhail Aleksandrovich Romanov”
— Vladislav Krasnov, president, Russian American Goodwill Association
“This is a serious historical book, and an important account of this crucial period in Russia’s history. This book fills important gaps”
— Andrei Maylunas, Literary Review, London
“If the Russians rediscover Michael, then it is hard to think of a better role model than he for a modern and democratic Russia”
— Antonia Tildesley, Parliamentary Brief, London
“And now, remembering this man, I wonder how You, Russia, will wash away his innocent blood? Will you ultimately be able to redeem the death of Michael the Last?
— Vladimir Gushchik, Russian author and former Bolshevik commissar, 1927
INTRODUCTION
THE life of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, younger brother of Tsar Nicholas II, is not one which hitherto has easily fitted into the history books. His affair with the beautiful double divorcée daughter of a Moscow lawyer, was conducted in secrecy. When she gave birth to his illegitimate son, the official world refused to accept that he was the father.
His runaway marriage under the eyes of the Tsar’s trailing secret police was so carefully concealed that they never found out how he had done it without their knowing.
On becoming Emperor, in succession to his brother Nicholas, it was said that he had immediately abdicated, though he never did. And when the Bolsheviks put a bullet in his head, they pretended for their own good reasons that he had escaped.
It is small wonder, therefore, that Grand Duke Michael, hidden away by the Soviets, has been something of a mystery man in the story of modern Russia.
Even in 1951, when his widow — ‘the last uncrowned Empress’ — died penniless in a Paris charity hospital, they did not know who she was.
In fact, the real story of Michael is that of the one Romanov whom Russia could least afford to lose. It is also the story of the one Romanov whom Russia in coming years could yet rediscover to its advantage.
1. LOVE AND DUTY
FOR Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, younger brother of Tsar Nicholas II, the only place he would ever think of as his real home was the little garrison town of Gatchina, 29 miles north-west of St Petersburg. Although born in the Anichkov Palace on the Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg on November 22, 1878, it was the immense, 600-roomed palace at Gatchina where he had been brought up, and he would ever think of that and its parks and adjoining town as the place where he belonged and to which he would always want to return.
He was just three years old when his father, Alexander III, retreated there with his Danish-born wife Marie and their five children after the assassination of his 63-year-old grandfather Alexander II, ambushed by terrorists on his way back to the Winter Palace on Sunday March 1, 1881.
The bomb, thrown at his feet as he climbed down from his carriage to inspect the wounded from another bomb thrown a few minutes earlier, almost ripped him apart — his right leg torn away, his left leg shattered, his stomach, chest and face mutilated. He remained conscious only long enough to moan, ‘back to the palace… to die there.’1 There was nothing anyone could do for him after they carried his mangled body into his first-floor study at the palace; forty-five minutes later his eldest son, standing grimly at the window, was the new Tsar.
Alexander II, dubbed the ‘Tsar-Liberator’ because he had freed the peasants from serfdom, had that very morning signed a new constitutional order which would have introduced a measure of representative government into Russia; his murder ensured that the order died with him. His massively-built son was not the kind of man to offer concessions to the terrorists who threatened to kill him as they had killed his father. However, Russia could not afford to lose two Tsars in a row and Alexander III, furious that ‘I must retreat now before those skunks’,2 took himself and his family off to the security of Gatchina. It was the only retreat he would make. Once there, he stamped down hard on the anarchists, terrorists and revolutionaries who thought they could overthrow the Romanovs.
Thirty-six when he became Tsar, Alexander III did not claim to know what was best for liberal Britain, republican France, or the new thrusting German empire fashioned by Bismarck, but he thought he knew what was best for Russia: not muddle-headed constit
utional government but the stern hand of a loving father. Under this Alexander, the country would begin to catch up with the industrialised West, the huge bureaucratic machine would begin to tick over more smoothly, and Russian prosperity would increase as never before.
Favouring peasant dress of blouse and boots, and wearing patched shirts,3 Alexander had barked the orders in Gatchina which had transmitted his rule from the Baltic to the Pacific, and in so doing he had made Russia respected in every chancellery in Europe and beyond. An intimidating figure, standing six feet four inches tall, his physical strength was as awesome as it was legendary.
When, in the middle of a Balkan crisis, the Austrian ambassador was rash enough to hint at a state dinner that his country might mobilise two or three army corps, the Tsar’s reaction was to pick up a silver fork, bend it into a knot, and toss it contemptuously in the direction of a now discomfited ambassador. ‘That’, said Alexander, ‘is what I am going to do to your two or three army corps.’4 However, after only thirteen years as Tsar, and at the age of only forty-nine, Alexander fell ill, and although his doctors believed that all he needed was a long rest and reviving sunshine, his condition rapidly deteriorated. He was suffering from a kidney complaint which, long undiagnosed, had developed into nephritis. On October 20, 1894, he died at his holiday home at Livadia, in the Crimea, and at the age of twenty-six his son Nicholas became Emperor in his place.
At the moment he found himself Tsar, Nicholas had cried out: ‘What am I going to do… I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling…’5
But help was at hand. One of those present in the death-chamber at Livadia was his 22-year-old fiancée of six months, Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. Unable to speak a word of Russian, she had watched the bustle of the past days in silence. However, she became increasingly dismayed that her husband-to-be seemed to be ignored entirely by the crush around the dying Tsar’s bed. So she went to his study, opened his diary, and penned a note to him in English which would be the first of many such notes to come. ‘Be firm and make the doctors come to you every day and tell you how they find him… so that you are always the first to know. Don’t let others be put first and you left out…Show your own mind and don’t let others forget who you are.’6
It was the message she would still be sending him twenty-three years later as their world collapsed around them.
MICHAEL was not quite sixteen when his father died and it marked the end of his childhood as it marked the end of an era for Russia. Three months earlier his elder sister Xenia had married a second cousin, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich — known in the family as ‘Sandro’ — and one week after his father’s funeral in November 1894 his brother Nicholas married Princess Alix, now to be styled the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna. His other brother George, two years his senior and suffering from tuberculosis, was living in the high air of the Caucasus in the hope that it would save his life. His distracted mother, now the Dowager Empress, and trying to come to terms with the loss of her husband, moved back to the Anichkov Palace, taking with her Michael and his younger sister Olga, aged twelve. The new emperor Nicholas would make his family home in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles north of the capital, and reign from there not the Winter Palace, which after the assassination of Alexander II was used only for ceremonial and official purposes. With that, Gatchina palace become a place visited only occasionally until seven years later when Michael found himself back there as a soldier, and able to make it his home again.
For a young Grand Duke there were few choices when it came to a career, so Michael at eighteen followed the traditional path into the military. In the army he found himself for the first time among young men of his own age, free to make friendships of his own choosing, and to follow his own pursuits — and certainly, in sporting terms, more than able to compete with his fellow officers. Standing well over six feet tall — his brother Nicholas was barely five foot seven — he swiftly became a crack shot, a skilled swordsman, and so excellent a rider he won prizes steeplechasing.
After a spell at artillery school he first joined the Horse Guards Artillery, serving with them until June 1902 when, aged twenty-three, he was transferred to the élite Guards cavalry regiment, the Blue Cuirassiers, garrisoned in Gatchina, and of which his mother was colonel-in-chief.7 Michael, who took his soldiering seriously, was appointed a squadron commander. With that he moved back into his old apartment.
Gatchina palace, designed by the celebrated Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi, was deliberately unlike any of the other Romanov palaces in and around St Petersburg. Commissioned by Grigory Orlov, Catherine the Great’s lover, who had been given Gatchina as reward for helping her to depose and then dispose of her husband Peter III — strangled in 1762 to clear the way for her seizing his throne — it was built in mellowed limestone in what the Russians regarded as the ‘English style’. This meant it was on austere, simple lines, with walls left in natural stone colour rather than painted yellow, blue, or Venetian red as was the case with the other more classically-styled Romanov palaces. Surrounded by a drawbridged moat, it was said by its detractors to look more like a barracks than a royal palace, though that was one good reason for Alexander III going there. No terrorist would ever breach its security, though that may have been because no terrorist ever thought there was any chance of doing so.
Alexander III had housed his family not in the palace itself but in the adjoining quadrangle, known as the Arsenal, a place originally intended for staff, not their masters. Michael’s three-roomed apartment there was off the vaulted, low-ceilinged corridor on the mezzanine floor of the three-storey building. He had a bedroom with a single brass bed, a sitting room furnished with button-backed sofa and armchairs, a study with a desk and mahogany desk-chair, and a bathroom with a tin bath, albeit linked to hot-and-cold running water, and shelves filled with his shaving tackle and pomades.
The rooms were cluttered, as all rooms were in the style of the day, with the walls covered in family photographs and military prints. In the display cabinet in his sitting room there were sets of painted lead soldiers as well as his collection of crystal ornaments, and throughout the suite, on side tables and chairs, there could be found the bric-a-brac to be expected in any apartment occupied by a well-off but not overly fussy young bachelor.
What his apartment noticeably did not have was a kitchen. When he wanted something, day or night, he ordered whatever it was from the main palace, still swarming with uniformed servants, many of them in the dress of the eighteenth-century. For even though the palace no longer had a place in the official business of empire, it continued to function as before, with sailors manning boats on the lake, soldiers on guard at the doors, and important functionaries issuing orders to gardeners, footmen, cooks, maids and liveried menservants. Sometimes his mother would return for a week or so and then the palace would bustle around the business of luncheon and dinner parties and in opening shutters on rooms closed for most of the year. But otherwise the vast palace primarily served the needs of those who worked there, the kitchens cooking meals for the staff, not for its imperial master, the maids cleaning rooms which from day-to-day only they would walk through.
Thus, modest though his own private apartments were, Michael needed no more. He could entertain whenever he wished in the main palace, or under the magnificent painted ceilings of the eighteenth-century Pavilion of Venus in the great park outside.
His fellow officers were free to boat on its lakes, stroll in its gardens, take girls for winter sleigh rides, shoot in its woods, and on occasion dance in its ballroom. So although only Michael could call it home, the palace was full of life throughout the year, and a vibrant part of the social world both within the Blue Cuirassiers and the town itself.
Gatchina, founded in 1796, was a graceful place to live. There were houses painted primrose-yellow, standing in large country-style gardens, elegant apartment blocks, imposing public buildings, and two g
reat churches, the Cathedral of St Paul and the Church of the Intercession of Our Lady, which lay at the head of the main boulevard. Although its usual population was only 18,000, in the summer that greatly expanded as the trains from St Petersburg, just an hour away, pulled into the town’s two railway stations and disgorged families, servants, dogs and the mounds of luggage which marked the annual exodus from the capital to the summer dachas in and around Gatchina. There were evening concerts in the palace park, sailing on the two great lakes around the town, and leisurely dinners in the crowded restaurants on the tree-lined boulevards. And always and everywhere the delicious murmur of scandals, real or imagined.
Michael, as the town’s own Grand Duke, was rarely the subject of critical gossip and woe betide anyone from the capital who thought of doing so in earshot of any resident of Gatchina. He was popular, greatly admired, and the Grand Duke whom the town was proud to think of as its own. He was never accompanied by guards or officials or courtiers and he never exhibited any signs of rank. Walking openly through the streets he would stop and cheerfully chat to the locals, patting their children, and often quietly helping those in need — though sometimes he was known to be too trusting for his own good, giving aid where none was deserved.
This approval of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich was echoed well beyond the narrow world of Gatchina itself. His brother-in-law Sandro wrote of him that ‘he fascinated everybody by the wholehearted simplicity of his manner. A favourite with his family, with his fellow officers, and with all his countless friends, he possessed a well-organised mind and would have succeeded in any branch of the service.’8
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