The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

by Donald Crawford

  As headquarters chaplain, Michael recruited Natasha’s family friend, Father Popsolov, who had christened baby George in 1910. However, his most personal appointment was that of an American boxing coach; boxing was one of his enthusiasms and he saw no reason why the war should interrupt it. The commander of his Tartar regiment, Colonel Peter Polovtsov — later a senior general — remembered Michael as ‘tall, very slim, a perfect sportsman, an excellent horseman, a very good shot, and his American boxing teacher always told me that it was a pity that he was a Grand Duke, because he would have done very well as a prizefighter in the ring.’10

  Michael was well pleased with the way his division had come together in its first weeks and towards the end of October 1914 he went north to the supreme headquarters, called Stavka, to meet his brother who was there on a visit from Tsarskoe Selo. The headquarters were set in a clearing inside a forest of pines and birches, just outside Baranovichi, ‘a miserable little country town,’11 but which was an important railway junction and roughly at the centre of the 500-mile Russian line.

  It was the first time the two brothers had seen each other in over two years, but it was not the occasion or place for a family discussion, so there was no mention of issues which were likely only to end up in a row. Nicholas simply found Michael enthusiastic about his new command. Three days later, on October 27, Nicholas wrote to Alexandra: ‘I had the pleasure of spending the whole of Saturday with Misha who has become quite his old self and is again charming.’ A little wooden church had been built beside the railway tracks and Michael and Nicholas went there for evening service, ‘and parted after dinner’.12

  Michael went on briefly to Gatchina to finalise his affairs there and, before returning to the front and the risks of the battlefield, to write to his brother about a matter which he had not raised when they met but which continued to trouble him: the fact that four years after his birth, his son George was still illegitimate. Whilst a divisional commander’s life expectancy was considerably better than that of a junior office, rank was no protection against artillery shells, snipers, or a random bullet. Michael was also not a man to hang back in the rear; as one of his commanders would say of him later, ‘the only trouble he gave us was through his constant wish to be in the fighting-line; we sometimes had great difficulty in keeping him out of danger’.13

  Were he to be killed in the war, as might happen, Natasha would not inherit anything. The 1912 manifesto, by which Michael’s assets had been placed in administration, remained in force; he was still in the same position as ‘a minor or a lunatic’14 and technically without rights to the management of his estates or monies. But to leave innocent little George as a bastard was surely to take punishment beyond anything which was reasonable. He said as much to Nicholas: ‘It is very hard for me to go away, leaving my family in such an ambiguous position. I wish for my only beloved son to be accepted by society as my son and not as the son of an unknown father, as he is registered on his birth certificate…Remove from me the burden of the worry that, should something happen to me, that my son would have to grow up with the stigma of illegitimacy… You alone can do this, as it is your right… And after all, he is not to blame!’15

  There was no reply, and Michael set off to rejoin the Savage Division with even more reason to hope that he would come back alive. Now judged ready for action, his regiments had moved by train to the Austrian border where the wide-gauge Russian railway ended. The Russian frontline was far forward into the Carpathian Mountains, and the division rode the rest of the way to the positions selected for it as part of the Second Cavalry Corps.16

  The Austrians would have good reason to fear Michael’s Muslims in the future, but the first to do so were the unfortunate inhabitants they met as they advanced over the frontier. Finding themselves on conquered territory, the men of one regiment, quartered in an Austrian village, decided to take the spoils of war, and that first night there was chaos as excited Tartars raced around the village, chasing dishevelled girls. It was only at dawn that order was restored and the most serious offenders lined up to be flogged, twenty-five lashes being considered the usual punishment, though rapists convicted at court martial could be shot. Later, two men in that regiment would be and when they were condemned the staff at Michael’s headquarters offered to provide a firing squad from another regiment. However, the Tartars insisted on carrying out the execution themselves, the two men preferring, it was said, to die facing friendly faces.17 The Savage Division was difficult to handle behind the lines, but when it reached the enemy it behaved with the courage expected of men who relished battle, whether on foot or on horseback. They would find themselves involved in very heavy fighting over the next months, and earn considerable distinction on that bloody battlefield. So would Michael. He would find himself coming out of it a national hero.

  ALTHOUGH Michael was more than a thousand miles (1,600km) from Gatchina, the journey south to meet him was one which never daunted Natasha. It took two days to get there, over tracks made the slower by the amount of war traffic they were carrying. The first trip came at the beginning of December 1914, when she could only hope that he would be there when she arrived, and knowing that at best he could snatch no more than a few days from the front. Her destination was the former Polish city of Lvov, fifty miles inside Austro-Hungary and known there as Lemberg. The Russians had captured it in September; Michael’s headquarters were in a village 100 miles to the south-west and he could be in Lvov in a car in a few hours. Fortunately he was able to snatch a few days from the frontline, which for Natasha more than justified the laborious journey there and back to Gatchina. Indeed, she would return the following month, and then again two months later.

  Apart from her natural fears for Michael’s life, what troubled Natasha particularly was her belief that he had been posted to the Savage Division in retaliation for his marriage. On her return to Gatchina she wrote to say: ‘You are naturally talked about more than the division and what pains me most of all is that they say you did not go to war of your own accord, but were sent to atone for your guilt towards Russia — so your heroism, with which you wished to surprise the world, has been totally wasted…18 In fact, it had not been wasted, but she could not know that at the time.

  Nevertheless she had good reason to believe, as she would continue to do, that Michael had been sent to the most distant part of the Russian line as punishment for having married her, though Michael never seemed to care one way or another. He had come back to fight, and if that meant commanding an irregular division of Muslim horsemen, so be it. As it happened, they were very good at what they did, and that was its own cause for pride in his command.

  In the New Year, he was in a sector of the front line which was quiet enough to allow him to take two weeks’ leave — effectively ten days since four days of that were spent in travelling. He arrived home on January 2, 1915 — ‘what a joy to be back with my family in lovely Gatchina’, he scribbled in his diary19 — and next day went to ‘the detestable Petrograd’ to inspect the new hospital which Natasha had organised for him in his unused palace on the English Embankment. Then, after shopping with Natasha, and calling on his mother, he went to Tsarskoe Selo to see his brother, and press him again about legitimising little George.

  Nothing had been done about that in the two months since he had written to him about it, and nothing would happen this time. Nicholas avoided the subject, for it was a sore point at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra opposed any concessions suggesting acceptance of the marriage, and legalising George would in her mind have gone some way towards that. Michael returned home no further forward than before. It was a bitter failure. Three years later Nicholas would plead ‘a father’s feelings’ in justifying a decision about his son Alexis, but that applied only to himself. Michael’s worries were dismissed out of hand.

  All too soon the leave was over and he set off back to his divisional headquarters, now at Lomna, sixty miles south-west of Lvov. ‘It is so sad to leave’, he wrote in his diary for Ja
nuary 11, though Natasha insisted on travelling with him as far as Lvov, which gave them almost two days extra together. On arrival they parted hurriedly, for the Austrians had launched an offensive, and the Russian line was being pushed back. ‘The fighting is unceasing’, he told Natasha in his first letter home.20 One of his colonels had been killed, and three staff officers seriously wounded, one of whom would die two days later. Sixty of his horsemen were casualties.

  Michael’s headquarters had been pulled back in the fighting and in the confusion of the move all his belongings were mislaid, ‘so I do not have even a bar of soap’.21 But by January 20 he was able to report that ‘the crisis is over and the enemy is in retreat along our entire frontline. We are now dealing mainly with the Hungarian troops, who fight with great persistence. Yesterday our infantry (on our right flank) lost 1,000 men, but in my division the losses were quite small.’ 22

  The Carpathians are a thick belt of mountains, with one rising above another, often with a slope of one-in-six and covered in trees. These heights dominate the passes, which were deep in snow, and each had to be fought for at the point of a bayonet. It was a savage business and no one who was there could think that war was glory. Temperatures fell to minus 17 degrees and ‘the poor soldiers, especially at night, freeze terribly and many have frostbitten feet and hands. The losses in the infantry attached to us have been very great,’ wrote Michael.23 The enemy suffered as greatly and sometimes more so. One Austrian regiment of some 1,800 men froze to death as it lay waiting to advance the following morning. Rifles locked solid by ice had to be heated over fires before infantrymen could be sent into battle. Trenches were so difficult to dig that men could often do no more than bury themselves in the snow.

  The casualty figures in all armies were horrific and beyond anything known to history before. After six months of fighting the Russians had lost a million men, dead, wounded or captured. ‘Corps have become divisions, brigades have shrunk into regiments’, Nicholas confessed to Alexandra.24 The slaughter appalled Michael, who unlike his brother, could see it at first hand. He believed the war itself to be a catastrophe, entered into blindly by men who little knew what they were doing. As he told Natasha on February 16, 1915, in a letter which said much about his own political instincts:

  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.

  I even sometimes feel ashamed to face the people, i.e. the soldiers and officers, particularly when visiting field hospitals, where so much suffering is to be seen, for they might think one is also responsible, for one is placed so high and yet has failed to prevent all that from happening and to protect one’s country from this disaster…’ 25

  Two weeks earlier he had written to tell her to postpone her next proposed trip to Lvov because ‘the situation is such that it is difficult to say when we might have a few free days.’26 The fighting had not stopped since his return to the division after the New Year. It was a brutal business; on going forward to one captured position ‘we saw such horrors as I am not going to describe’.27 Yet at the same time, hoping to reassure her that he was in no personal danger, he had written that ‘most of the time I sit at home and feel miserably bored. To be at war and not even take advantage of the fresh air seems so stupid.’ 28

  What he did not tell her was that the day before, as his diary noted, he had been climbing on foot through freezing snow up a mountain, identified on his map as Height 673, inspecting positions which within hours would be under heavy enemy assault, ‘with intense shooting from the front and both flanks, causing great losses.’ One regiment ‘lost 300 soldiers’.29

  Despite the bitterness of the fighting, and Michael’s request on February 4 that she postpone her next visit, Natasha insisted on taking the chance of seeing him, setting off again on February 10. On this occasion she was lucky to see him at all, as he had warned. The Austrians had just regained two towns, Chernovitsy and Stanislavov, and the Russian Eighth Army commander General Aleksei Brusilov had ordered Michael ‘to straighten out the situation’.30 It involved a long cross-country move and the establishment of new headquarters in the town of Striy, forty miles from Lvov. Michael drove to Lvov to meet Natasha at the station, but it was the briefest of reunions. He wiped away her tears and left her in the Governor’s house. Shortly afterwards he sent her a note to say that ‘fighting is on and it is impossible to say how long it will last, maybe five, maybe more than ten days. Therefore I cannot ask you to stay on in Lvov and I suggest you leave at once…Yesterday there were heavy losses in the 2nd Brigade’. Then, thinking that this sounded alarmist, he added, ‘there is no need to worry about my safety, for I am far from the battle area’.31

  That was not true. He was with the frontline troops, moving from village to village, finding lodgings where he could, and ‘walking with the main forces’ as they came up to the Austrians, led by their famous and rightly respected Tyrolese riflemen. Outnumbered two to one, Michael’s Tartars and Chechens, fighting on foot, met the Austrians in a forest. There was a bloody hand-to-hand battle, but the bayonets of the ‘stalwart Tyrolese’ wavered in the face of the swords and daggers of ‘the active little Tartars’, their commander proudly reported.32

  Half his men lay dead among the trees, and as Michael rode up ‘he was very much impressed’ by the fight the regiment had put up, but also clearly saddened as he rode through the woods full of corpses. ‘A battlefield after a fight is not a beautiful picture,’ noted the Tartar colonel, ‘and I think that the kind heart of the Grand Duke suffered from the sight.’ 33

  With that, Michael wrote to Natasha that his division had been pulled back for a rest and that they could meet again in Lvov. She arrived on March 1, and when she and Michael awoke next morning it was to find that he was being honoured with Russia’s highest gallantry award, the Order of St George, on the recommendation of his tough-minded army commander Brusilov. In contrast to the Cross of St George — which could be and was awarded in the field in its thousands by battlefield generals, the Order had to be approved by no less than fifteen Knights of the Order. No honour in Russia was so highly prized.

  The award, made independently of the Tsar, was made in recognition of his conduct on the battlefield ‘during which he exposed his life to great danger, inspiring and encouraging the troops under constant enemy fire by the example of his personal bravery and courage and when resisting attacks by superior enemy forces…and later, when moving onto the offensive, he contributed to the successful development of our manoeuvres by his energetic actions…’34

  The honour impressed even the cynical back-biting circles in the capital, Petrograd. Newspapers across the country published the announcement and the laudatory comments which accompanied it. Michael, wrote one war correspondent, ‘always wanted to be wherever there was danger…seeing the Grand Duke at their forward positions the ranks were ready to follow him to a loyal death’.35 He was ‘the idol of his men’, wrote another, ‘sleeping in the open with them, and living the same life as they did, without the least indulgence…’36

  Brother-in-law Sandro was also highly approving, noting that Michael’s division, ‘led by him through innumerable battles, being recognised by GHQ as our best fighting unit’37 — and that after only six months with horsemen who had known nothing of soldiering when he took command.

  ‘We were all devoted to him’, said a colonel.38 Ordinary soldiers simply called him Dzhigit Misha — meaning ‘Our Caucasian horseman Michael’, a compliment they gave to no other Russian officer, and because they did not distinguish rank as carefully as they should have done, they also addressed him as ‘Your Majesty’ rather than ‘Your Royal Highness’.39


  The men trusted him implicitly, believing that whatever their grievance they could go to him for justice. One such dispute involved an Ingush Cossack rider who had captured two officers. Taking an officer prisoner earned a medal, and the simple Ingush reasoned therefore that he was entitled to two medals. Stubbornly refusing to accept what he was told by his own officers, he argued his way into divisional headquarters and was brought before Michael. Having heard him, Michael burst out laughing: ‘Lord, what am I to do with him?’

  His staff had no doubt. ‘You must tell him he is wrong, Your Highness.’

  ‘I know perfectly well he is wrong, but he is offended. He places his hopes on me, and it is not within my power to help him’.

  With that, the Ingush bowed. ‘Do not help me’, he said. ‘I thought that they were lying, but if you say it, that means it is true. Do not be angry’. Michael gave him the medal he was due, and settled the matter of the second officer by handing the grateful rider twenty roubles.40

  Some matters ended badly. Later, three men condemned to death by a court martial for looting, were taken out for execution. In the process they broke free and were shot dead, with one guard killed and another wounded in the confusion. Michael was horrified, noting that ‘it all turned out to very horrible and tragic, and such a shame, as a telegram with their pardon had been received and was to be read to them at the place of execution for greater effect — and it all failed!’41

  Michael’s abiding concern for his men was its own testimony to his leadership in fashioning a formidable division from Muslim tribesmen who had never before known military discipline, and whose differences with each other hampered rather than helped the forging of a coherent unit. That in itself earned him distinction.