The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

by Donald Crawford

  His cousin and close friend, Prince Nicholas of Greece, observed that ‘he was a very keen soldier and a real sportsman; his jovial nature endeared him to all. He was a fine, athletic young man, and went in for physical training, which he practised like a professional gymnast’.9

  Yet there was much more to him than that. He spoke French and English fluently and was a competent musician on piano, flute, balalaika and guitar, composing several of his own pieces. He enjoyed the theatre, ballet and opera, and was widely-read. In one letter he listed the books he was then reading; they included A History of the French Revolution, a biography of Robespierre, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, as well as a couple of other literary novels.

  Polovtsov, a member of the state Council, and head of the Imperial Russian Historical Society, which had published several of Michael’s academic papers on the Napoleonic War,10 judged that Michael ‘has an extraordinary strong will and once he has taken an aim in his sights he will achieve it without haste, and with undeviating firmness.’11

  Sergei Witte, who had been Alexander III’s chief advisor and who twelve years later became Russia’s first prime minister after the convulsions of the 1905 Revolution forced Nicholas to agree to the formation of an elected Duma, or parliament, was another who spoke highly of Michael. He had taught him political science and economics,12 and he had long made little secret of his view that Michael was to be preferred to Nicholas. One senior courtier observed that Witte ‘never tired of praising his straightforwardness.’13 Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich wrote that ‘Witte sees in him a clear mind, an unshakeable conviction in his opinions, and a crystalline moral purity.’14

  Dr E. J. Dillon, the widely-respected correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, quoted Witte as saying that ‘if Alexander III had lived, or if his son Michael had succeeded him or were yet to come to the throne, much might be changed for the better, and Russia’s international position strengthened.’15

  Comments such as this were taken seriously at the time, for in 1899 Michael’s elder brother George had been found dying beside his overturned motorcycle near his home in the Caucasus, and with that Michael, still only twenty, had become heir to the throne, for although Nicholas had daughters he had as yet no son to succeed him.

  In eighteenth-century Russia there had been empresses reigning in their own right — the widow of Peter the Great, his daughter Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great — but after Paul I succeeded his mother, whom he hated, he ruled that henceforth no woman was eligible to take the crown; that law had been accepted as binding ever since.

  Six weeks before Michael found himself heir, Alexandra had been delivered of her third child, Marie, and after that it was noticed that Nicholas ‘set off on a long solitary walk’, although when he came back he seemed as ‘outwardly unruffled as ever.’16 Obsessed with her need to produce a male heir, Alexandra quickly became pregnant again in the autumn of 1900, though it seemed that it might be too late, for Nicholas had fallen gravely ill on holiday in the Crimea and there were fears that he might die. He had intestinal typhus, a disease which in those days often proved fatal. In that event, Michael would automatically succeed his brother as Emperor.

  Alexandra refused to accept that, insisting to gathering ministers that even if Nicholas died, the posthumously-born child, if a boy, should be declared Tsar and that in the meantime she should rule Russia as Regent on behalf of her womb. The ailing Nicholas ‘sided with his wife’. Court minister Baron Fredericks reported that Nicholas thought Michael ‘will get everything into a mess — he is so easily imposed upon.’17 Witte strongly disagreed. At an impromptu conference of ministers in a Yalta hotel he ‘succeeded in winning over to my side all the members of the improvised conference. It was decided that in the event of the Emperor’s death we should immediately take an oath of allegiance to Michael Aleksandrovich.’18

  Witte, dismissed as prime minister in 1906, dated his becoming ‘the object of Alexandra’s particular enmity’ from his stand at Yalta, which she interpreted as ‘an underhand intrigue on my part against her.’19 As it happened, it was all for nothing anyway: the Tsar recovered and when Alexandra did give birth to her fourth child, it was another girl, Anastasia. It would not be for another four years — in August 1904 — that Alexandra finally and triumphantly produced the long-awaited son and heir, named Alexis. Tragically, he would be found to be suffering from the ‘bleeding disease’ haemophilia, with any bump or bruise a threat to his life.

  Six months earlier, in Germany, her sister Irene, married to the Kaiser’s brother Prince Henry, had lost her own haemophilic son to the ‘terrible illness of the English family’; years earlier, Alexandra’s own little brother had also died after he fell and bumped his head in Darmstadt. The threat was clear and terrible: Alexis’s chances of surviving childhood, or even living long into manhood, were not great.

  However, that Alexis was so inflicted was not immediately apparent and in the manifesto produced on his birth Nicholas declared that in the event of his own death before Alexis was old enough to reign in his own right — 1920 — Michael was appointed Regent. Characteristically, Alexandra succeeded in adding her name as co-Regent, meaning that she and Michael would rule in tandem. With that, Michael had especial reason to pray for his brother’s well-being.

  GIVEN that the life of the infant Tsarevich was at constant risk, there were very good reasons why Michael’s mother the Dowager Empress should be anxious that he married the right woman. The immediate imperial family relied upon him to be able to step in, should anything terrible happen, as it could do in those dangerous times. He was the insurance policy for the throne of his father.

  There were plenty of other Grand Dukes in the line of succession, to be sure, as descendants of Alexander II or his predecessor Nicholas I, but the Dowager Empress was chiefly interested in keeping the crown in the hands of her late husband’s direct descendants, not passing elsewhere. In her mind, Michael properly married was the best hope of ensuring that future. Moreover, when she looked at the other Romanovs, there were none with the qualities she saw in her son Michael.

  The family which ranked immediately behind him was headed by her brother-in-law Vladimir, who for his own reasons had always thought that he would have proved a better Tsar than his elder brother Alexander, though no one else outside his own circle shared his conviction. He had been briefly banished by Alexander after a disgraceful scene in a St Petersburg restaurant, in which he drunkenly tried to throttle a French actor whom he thought had made a pass at his wife20, but in 1908, aged sixty-one, he was the senior Grand Duke after Michael, and stood third-in-line to the throne.

  His wife Maria Pavlovna was a German princess from Mecklenberg-Schwerin who had steadfastly refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, notwithstanding the imperial law which made that a condition of marriage to a Romanov. Since they had married in Lutheran Germany, there was nothing the Russian church could do about that, but purists questioned whether in consequence he remained eligible for the throne — and indeed, whether therefore any of his three sons were in turn fit to succeed. A towering figure as huge as his brother Alexander, Vladimir’s answer to that was to smash his fist down and damn the rules. The Romanovs made the law, not the Church, and the priests could go hang.

  It was an understandable stance, for fourth in line was his eldest son Kirill, who had broken church law by marrying his first cousin ‘Ducky’. Although it was common enough for royals to marry first cousins in Europe — Queen Victoria married her first cousin — the Russian Orthodox Church prohibited marriages of that kind. Since he had defied the law, Kirill had been banished for that in 1905, though for Empress Alexandra at Tsarskoe Selo his greater crime was that Ducky had divorced Alexandra’s brother Ernst, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, swopping one first cousin for another. That was family rift not church law, though Ducky excused herself by saying that Ernst was a homosexual: ‘no boy was safe, from the stable hands to the kitchen help. He slept quite openly with them all�
��, she would tell a niece.21 Ducky and Alexandra hated each other ever after.

  Fifth in line was Kirill’s brother Boris, a year younger than Michael; like Michael he was still unmarried, but unlike Michael he had led a notorious life, frequenting prostitutes as well as being involved in a number of scandalous affairs, including one with Ducky’s sister Marie, the future Queen of Romania. It was an open secret that the father of her daughter was not her husband but Boris — though for the sake of the Romanian crown, that was hushed up and her cuckolded husband acknowledged the baby girl Marie as his.22 It was just as well, since she ultimately became the Queen of Yugoslavia.

  Boris was also involved in another scandal when he bedded a young woman in St Petersburg on the eve of her wedding. Sadly for the bride-to-be the bridegroom found out and the wedding was cancelled.23 Of all the Grand Dukes, Boris could be said to be the one more likely to be shot by a husband than by a terrorist.

  Sixth in line was Andrew, Kirill’s youngest brother, who was living contentedly with the prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, seven years his senior. They had an illegitimate son, Vovo — though Vovo himself was never sure whether his father was Andrew, who acknowledged him, or her previous lover Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich.24 However, what was recognised was that Andrew would never give up Kschessinska, and never marry anyone else.

  Seventh in line at the beginning of 1908 was Vladimir’s younger brother Alexis. Officially a bachelor, it was widely known that Alexis had secretly married a commoner but whom he subsequently abandoned for a French actress. Sometime in charge of the navy, he was widely blamed for the disasters of the 1904 war with Japan —‘fast women, slow ships’, was the popular comment on him. Such was public scorn that his actress mistress had been booed off stage when she appeared in St Petersburg, and had fled back to Paris; Alexis followed her. In November 1908, aged fifty-eight, he would die there in her arms.25

  Eighth in line was Vladimir’s youngest brother Paul, who after the death of his first wife, Princess Alexandra of Greece, had also fled to Paris where he married a divorcée commoner, Olga Pistolkors.26 Olga’s mistake, when his mistress, had been to wear jewels given to Paul’s mother the Empress Marie at a palace ball; the Dowager Empress recognised them, and ordered her out. A crimson-faced Olga crept away and next day left the country. Paul followed her, leaving behind his two young children Dimitri and Marie by his first wife — a niece of the Dowager Empress. With Paul banished because of his marriage, the two children would be brought up firstly by the Tsar’s childless sister-in-law Ella and her husband Serge and then, after Serge’s assassination in Moscow in 1905, at Tsarskoe Selo by Nicholas and Alexandra.

  Ninth in line was Paul’s only son Dimitri, and the one bright spot in the line, since he was still at seventeen too young to have blotted his own book — mercifully, no one could then foresee that one day he would be also banished abroad, in his case for murder.

  Tenth in line was Nicholas Konstantinovich, a nephew of Alexander II, who had been banished after a scandalous affair with an American actress, Fanny Lear, daughter of an Ohio preacher. Then still too young to have access to his own funds, he had been caught stealing imperial jewellery to fund the affair, and banished to Tashkent. There he had married a policeman’s daughter. Calling himself ‘Nicholas Romanov’ and declaring that he was a republican, he was an unlikely successor.27

  In short, there were scant grounds for reassurance when the Dowager Empress looked at those who, other than Michael, might follow him. However, whatever the misdeed, no Tsar had the power to remove any Romanov from the line of succession. What she saw was what they had.

  Five years earlier, after his Uncle Paul had vanished abroad with three million roubles and his divorcée mistress, Nicholas had sent a letter to his mother which seemed depressingly prophetic: How painful and distressing it all is and how ashamed one feels for the sake of our family before the world…in the end, I fear, a whole colony of members of the Russian Imperial Family will be established in Paris with their semi-legitimate and illegitimate wives! God alone knows what times we are living in, when undisguised selfishness stifles all feelings of conscience, duty or even ordinary decency’.28

  His younger sister Olga would later agree that he was absolutely right about ‘the appalling marital mess in which the last generation of my family involved themselves. That chain of domestic scandals could not but shock the nation but did any of them care for the impression they created? Never.’29

  When she pronounced that hypocritical verdict on her family, she was clearly not thinking of herself and her lover Captain Kulikovsky, later her husband after she divorced her first husband, Duke Peter of Oldenburg. But certainly, she had a point. The Romanovs had an awful lot of skeletons in their cupboard

  Michael was about to add another.

  THE girl whom both his mother and her sister in London, Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII, hoped he would marry was Her Royal Highness Princess Patricia of Connaught. Indeed that seemed to be what was to happen in September 1906 when the British Sunday newspapers announced their engagement. The London Observer was flattering about Michael. ‘Like his bride he is exceedingly fond of horses, and has taken part in a good many officers’ races. He is also adept at boxing, wrestling, riding, dancing, and swimming. He has always enjoyed the reputation of being a stronger character than the Emperor.’30

  Like his bride? Within hours of the newspapers landing on British breakfast tables, a flustered Buckingham Palace was issuing denials, prodded by an indignant Connaught family which knew that the reports of a betrothal were wholly baseless.

  The source of this non-betrothal lay in Denmark, where the Dowager Empress and her sister Queen Alexandra had as usual holidayed together that summer in the house they jointly owned at Hvidore. Eavesdropping courtiers, listening to their eager talk about Michael’s marital prospects, had somehow translated hope into fact, telling the Reuters agency in St Petersburg that what the sisters intended had already happened. Wisely, the Dowager Empress and Queen Alexandra kept silent, pretending to be as baffled as everyone else.

  Two years later, in October 1908, they tried again, sending Michael to London, where the Queen ‘paired’ him off with Princess Patricia for a weekend at the British royal family’s country home at Sandringham, 100 miles from London.31 Michael was polite, but disinterested. The only woman he was then interested in — or ever would be again — lived in Gatchina, and was married to a fellow officer in his regiment. Her name was Madame Nathalie Wulfert. Five years later it would be why he would find himself an exile in England.

  2. SCANDALOUS EXILE

  MADAME Nathalie Wulfert — known as Natasha — was five foot six inches tall, slender, fair-haired and possessed of deep-set velvety blue eyes which once seen would be rarely forgotten. In December 1907, when Michael first set eyes on her, she was twenty-seven, elegant, poised, and very beautiful, with a way of holding herself, a look about her which turned eyes wherever she went. Her taste was impeccable, she had immense charm, she was unquestionably clever and at the dinner table she could converse easily and knowledgeably about books, theatre, ballet and opera. Her friends included the young composer Sergei Rachmaninov and the famed basso Fedor Chaliapin, and she could claim acquaintance with some of the best-known sculptors and painters in Russia. That was more than could be said of the conventional Guards wife in small-town yet snobbish Gatchina, where salon conversation rarely rose above the trite. However, these same salons had something to talk about when Natasha arrived — a divorcée with a four-year old daughter from her first marriage to a Moscow pianist, Sergei Mamontov, who worked at the Bolshoi opera.

  Although divorce had become more common in recent years, it still came with a considerable stigma in conservative circles, and that included the narrow world of Gatchina. The Dowager Empress, like her London sister Queen Alexandra, frowned on divorce and would not entertain anyone who had parted in that way. Since the Blue Cuirassiers was her regiment, divorcées could expect a c
old reception from the wives of senior officers. As Natasha would swiftly find out, she was not welcome in the higher salons, and as the wife of a mere lieutenant it was doubtful if she ever would be.

  Natasha had been born in a rented summer dacha in Petrova, on the outskirts of Moscow, on June 27, 1880, some eighteen months after Michael. Over the next twenty years her father, Sergei Aleksandrovich Sheremetevsky, had built up a successful law practice, employing eleven lawyers in all, and for a time was a deputy in the Moscow City Duma.1 Well-known in Moscow, he lived comfortably in a spacious apartment, No 52, at 6 Vozdvizhenkan, close to the Kremlin.2 Of his three daughters, Olga married a promising lawyer Aleksei Matveev — destined to play an important role in Michael’s life — Vera a successful businessman, and Natasha, the pianist Mamontov who hoped one day to be a conductor, which in time he would be.

  Unfortunately, one score he could never conduct harmoniously was his marriage. Inevitably other admirers stepped into his place, and after five years Natasha was divorced and had become wife of Lieutenant Vladimir Wulfert, with an apartment home at 7 Baggout Street, close by Gatchina’s Warsaw railway station. She and her daughter Tata had been there only a few months when Michael first set eyes on her in early December, 1907, in the regimental riding school;3 having introduced himself, he would never look at another woman ever again. In his case, it was love at first sight.

  Michael was very correct, and although local society gossiped inevitably about the way he danced attendance on Natasha, her husband made no complaint, seemingly flattered that he had found himself in a Grand Duke’s inner circle, dining in the palace, a welcome guest at every function at which Michael played host, and in his own mind with prospects of unexpected advancement in a regiment where otherwise he might spend years trying to get on the next rung of the ladder. However, as months passed, the public face of the marriage concealed its failure behind the closed doors of Baggout Street. Wulfert was a violent man, prone to rages, and an indifferent step-father to Natasha’s daughter Tata. By June, 1909, the marriage collapsed, and Natasha walked out never to return. After that the new man in her life became the adoring Grand Duke Michael. The scandal struck when Wulfert, blaming Michael for the break-up, challenged him to a duel.4 When news of that reached Tsarskoe Selo in July 1909 a furious Nicholas immediately despatched Michael to command a provincial cavalry regiment, the Chernigov Hussars, in faraway Orel, 240 miles south of Moscow. Wulfert was also removed from the regiment, and given a staff job in the Kremlin.