The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

by Donald Crawford

  But with the Council of St George’s approval of his high award, an Order founded by Catherine the Great but rarely given for gallantry on the battlefield, Nicholas’s reaction was a curious mixture of pleasure, pride, and yet begrudging condescension. Writing to Alexandra, he told her about ‘the splendid behaviour of Misha’s division in the February fighting, when they were attacked in the Carpathians by two Austrian divisions…while Misha was the whole time in the line of fire.’ He then added patronisingly, ‘I am very glad for his sake, as I think this time that he has really earned this military distinction and it will show him that he is, after all, treated exactly as all the others, and by doing his duty well he also gets his reward’.42

  Alexandra’s response was almost breathtaking in its priggishness. ‘I am sure this war will make more of a man of him — could one but get her out of his reach, her dictating influence is so bad for him.’43

  She was too blind to her own faults to know it, but many people were beginning to think that the charge of ‘dictating influence’ was more true about her and Nicholas than it was about Natasha and Michael. But at least there was one private gain for Michael in all this. Ten days later he wrote to his brother, raising again the question of his son.

  ‘Something that upsets me very much is that neither when we saw each other in January, nor in your letter afterwards, have you said anything in response to my personal request which means so much to me…please remember about it during Easter.’44 With the Order of St George on his chest, Michael felt more entitled than ever before to demand the legitimisation of little George — and Nicholas less able to refuse him, whatever Alexandra’s protests. This time the Tsar gave in, and four-year-old George had at last a named father and a title of his own — he was now to be styled Count Brasov.45

  But that was as far as Nicholas would go. He would still not release Michael’s assets; war hero he might be, but legally he was to remain in the role of madman. If he was killed, there might be some discretionary bequest now to his son, but Natasha would still be left penniless. The first three months of 1915 had seen the private tragedy of the death of her two sisters in Moscow: Olga of appendicitis in January, Vera of pneumonia in March. If anything, it heightened her fears for Michael. If he were killed, what would she have left? She could expect nothing from a Tsarskoe Selo which still thought of her as a villainess, and would never pardon her as they had yet to pardon Michael.

  As if to underline the point that he was not forgiven, the Tsar snubbed his brother when he paid a visit to the southern front in early April on ‘a victory tour’ and to see the newly-captured fortress of Przemysl, 70 miles east of Lvov. Although he was joined in Lvov by his two sisters, Xenia and Olga — who was nursing in Kiev — there was no invitation to any family reunion for Michael, and indeed he would not know that Nicholas had been to nearby Lvov until he read about it later in a local newspaper on April 10.46 That raised eyebrows in the Savage Division —‘the best in the Russian army’ with its commander awarded the Order of St George. And the Tsar had not bothered to tell them he was coming? Odd.

  Natasha, however, was in no doubt of the reason. Alexandra was not going to have Michael seen to be back in the family.

  5. ALEXANDRA THE GREAT

  TWO weeks after the Tsar departed Lvov to return home, with heady talk of an advance to Vienna in prospect, Michael also went home. His sector of the front had been quiet, with relatively little action. On April 19, 1915, a German plane dropped five bombs on his headquarters ‘without causing any damage’, there was sporadic firing from the enemy outposts, and ‘we buried a soldier, Veris, killed the day before yesterday’.1 One dead soldier in two days; given what had gone before that was almost peace. Five days later he was back in Gatchina, his division, after six months in the frontline, being withdrawn for rest and refitting, and that would take at least a month.

  That month passed so quickly that afterwards it seemed the briefest of interludes. Michael saw his brother twice at Tsarskoe Selo, and had tea with his mother at the Anichkov Palace. Otherwise he spent his whole time with Natasha. They drove out in his American Packard to have picnics with friends, went to the theatre in the capital, rode in the Gatchina palace park — and then, on May 23, Michael went back to the war. Natasha this time went with him only so far as Brest-Litovsk, a large town and railway junction some 200 miles north of Lvov, now too close to the frontline to be safe.

  In the month Michael had been away the war had started to go badly for Russia. Ground won on the south-west front was now ground lost. The Tsar’s victory tour of early April had been followed with a new offensive, master-minded by the Germans, and launched with an overwhelming artillery barrage which tore apart the Russian divisions facing them. Trenches collapsed and reinforcements brought up melted away as the shellfire fell on them.

  Many soldiers hastily marched into the battle zone were unarmed and dependent on picking up the weapons of soldiers who had fallen. A month after the offensive began, Przemysl was recaptured and three weeks later, on June 9, 1915, Lvov fell. Caught up in the retreat, Michael’s division withdrew behind the River Dniester, but held its ground thereafter. ‘Oh, how I wish this atrocious slaughter could be over soon’, he wrote home. In two days there were 1,000 casualties.

  In the midst of this, on June 6, 1915, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who had died at the age of fifty-seven, was buried with great pomp in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul. The only member of the imperial family absent that day was Michael.

  There was critical comment about that which upset Natasha. She wrote to him in bewilderment. ‘Darling Misha, why do you always harm yourself and why didn’t you come for K.K’s funeral. Literally all your relatives came en masse, only you didn’t appear… your absence was conspicuous. Even assuming that you did not feel like showing your face at a family gathering, you could have still taken that opportunity just to come home! Boris (Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich) had only just left and he came back again till June 20.’2

  That brought a stinging response from an outraged Michael. I did not come to the funeral of Konstantin K because I had only returned from a long leave a short while before that and did not think I had a right to leave here again; there is a war on, not children’s games with soldiers… while I am in command of a division, it is impossible for me to leave it so often; and if any of my relations do just that, they are wrong and they are not an example for me to follow.3

  The desperate fighting apart, there was another reason for his remaining at the frontline, and he tried to explain that, too. ‘Our division is not a regular army unit, and it’s not too easy to command it; there are a lot of different things to sort out — jealousy and rivalry between the regiments, their mutual complaints, etc. When I am here, everything gets into a more peaceful vein, but without me… it is more than difficult to control.’4

  Natasha, having complained about his absence from the state funeral, was plainly in a bad mood that day, for she added more personal criticism in the same letter. All the officers she saw in the capital, and when her train from the front stopped at Stavka, were smartly dressed, in crisp uniforms, polished boots and with an elegance that fitted well in the Winter Garden Room of the popular Astoria Hotel, which had become her favoured lunching place.

  In contrast, Michael, a fighting general, looked shabby, ill-dressed and muddy in almost all the photographs he sent her. ‘Look how awfully you now dress,’ she chided him. ‘Your boots are horrible, you’ve done away with your aiguillettes and instead of the St George you wear a piece of some narrow ribbon…I regret to see you so changed.’5

  Natasha had sent Michael a St George, made up for her at Fabergé, the imperial jewellers, not understanding that the only person likely to admire the gleam of a Fabergé was an enemy sniper. Personal appearance was not the uppermost consideration in the frontline, or at least in the Savage Division. As if to underline that point, Michael recorded a visit by the Ninth Army general Lechitsky to an artillery position wi
th a large entourage of braided staff officers; it was a target too good to miss and in consequence the general and his staff ‘had to spend two hours crouching in an empty trench’. It was their own fault, said Michael, for he often went to the same position ‘without all that pomp and retinue’ and nothing ever happened.6

  Someone who was certainly impressed by Michael’s appearance was the American war correspondent Stanley Washburn. When he visited Michael’s headquarters he was surprised to find the brother of the Tsar in ‘a simple uniform with nothing to indicate his rank but shoulder straps of the same material as his uniform, and, barring the St George (won by personal valour on the battlefield) without a decoration…’

  What also struck him about Michael was he should find him ‘living so simply in a dirty village in this far fringe of the Russian empire’. He rated Michael highly. ‘He evinced the same stubborn optimism that one finds everywhere in the Russian army’, he commented, ‘while appearing as unaffected and democratic a person as one can well imagine.7

  Washburn was right — Michael was optimistic, despite everything. ‘I feel so distressed because of Lvov’, he had written to Natasha, but adding that ‘to lose heart and think that we won’t win is just sinful. The morale of the army at the front is good, what I am concerned about is the attitude of the Russian people at large…’8

  When he wrote that he had good reason to be concerned about the ‘home front’. Serious rioting had broken out in Moscow. The defeats in Galicia resulted in revenge attacks on Germans living in Moscow. Many had been there for generations, owning important businesses, and thinking themselves German only in name.

  Natasha went there at the end of June, 1915, and saw for herself what had happened. ‘All that’s left of the shops and houses with German names are just bare walls, with the insides looted and burnt…It was real pillage, just organised and made possible by the indifference and inaction of the authorities and the police…’ One business friend whose home was ransacked ‘told me that members of the intelligentsia were among the rioters — obvious connoisseurs came to his house and chose the best pictures to destroy. So many wonderful paintings lost, such a shame!’9

  Michael felt ‘very sorry for the unfortunate victims’ and wrote that the pogrom ‘clearly demonstrates the hatred that the Russian people have long felt for foreigners living in Russia…

  The government ought to be ashamed that it can’t prevent such things, with many victims as a consequence. How I wish for a ‘wise government’ for my dear Russia, so that we could boast of it to all European states, but who knows if that will ever come, and if it does, I’m afraid it won’t be soon! I know you will understand what I mean, and will read between the lines…

  He added that ‘many people now feel that I was right to have married a Russian and not a German…’10 It was not difficult for Natasha ‘to read between the lines’. His barbs were aimed at Alexandra and her circle.

  Although the Savage Division suffered as much as any other as the retreat continued, by mid-July it had been pulled back to a sector which was relatively quiet, and which would remain so over the next few weeks, although on the rest of the front the fighting continued to be intense, as the Russians were pushed further and further back, with horrendous casualties. Michael took the opportunity of going back home for a brief leave — or so he thought.

  In fact, having got there he went down immediately with diphtheria, dreaded as one of the great killer diseases of the age, and which he had contracted at the front just before his departure. There were no antibiotics and many sufferers died from asphyxiation as their throats closed up. The minority who survived it took a long time to recover.

  Michael proved one of the lucky ones. A week after the first symptoms appeared he began to feel better and by July 30, 1915 he was well enough to have ‘played the guitar a little’.11 Six days later he was strong enough to have got up and gone downstairs for breakfast. That was encouraging, but there was little else to be cheerful about. On August 7 he grimly noted that ‘the war is so bad that I don’t want to write about it.’ Next day he tersely recorded, ‘Kovno and Novo-Georgievsk have been captured!’ Then it was to write that ‘Brest-Litovsk has surrendered. We’ve been in a bad mood for the past few days.’12

  One reason for these failures, Michael believed, was that Russian strategy was wrong, as events would prove. The war was not about holding or taking territory, he told Natasha, but about destroying the enemy’s army.

  What’s happening is that they are trying to achieve the opposite. All high commanders panic over every inch of land captured by the enemy instead of taking a huge fist and punching the enemy where it hurts. This simple and, one would think, reasonable tactic has not so far been used. They want to be strong everywhere, along the entire frontline, which of course is impossible and as a result, we are everywhere equally weak. 13

  Over the past three weeks the advancing Germans had captured Warsaw, then the string of Russian fortresses which in theory should have barred an enemy advance into Russia proper. Millions of shells had been locked up in them, along with hundreds of guns and tens of thousands of men. Now they had all gone with nothing to show for them.

  In the first year of the war the Russian army had lost one and a half million men, the equivalent of the whole of its peacetime army; whereas it had been fighting until the spring beyond its own borders, now, for the first time since Napoleon, an enemy was advancing deep inside Russia’s homeland, driving back not only the army but hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding west in flight from homes and crops burned behind them.

  Something had to be done and that something was firstly the dismissal of the disastrous war minister Sukhomlinov; he was not only incompetent but corrupt, supporting his high-spending and pretty young wife — at thirty, half his age — with bribes taken from army contracts.

  For very different reasons the Supreme Commander, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich — ‘Uncle Nikolasha’ — was to be brought down. The Grand Duke was well regarded by both the British and the French, and by the Germans no less, and his great height and soldierly bearing had impressed foreign correspondents. He was also more victim than villain in the scandal of an army without enough shells, rifles, and boots. Neither the public nor the army sought him as scapegoat. Nevertheless he was removed.

  But what shocked Russia, and its allies, was the name of his successor. The new Supreme Commander was to be a man who had never been on the battlefield, and whose last military command had been almost a quarter of a century earlier and then only as an officer in a squadron of the Hussar Life Guards.

  The Tsar appointed himself.

  Few approved. Michael’s cousin and friend Grand Duke Andrew observed that ‘thoughtful people believe that this step will cause general ill-feeling and discontent and have serious consequences’.14 The British military observer, Colonel Alfred Knox, who saw the army reaction at first hand, concluded that the misgivings ‘were almost universal’.15 The French ambassador Paléologue wrote that ‘the news has produced a deplorable impression.’16 Michael’s commander-in-chief Brusilov judged that Nicholas has ‘struck the last blow against himself’.17

  But if Nicholas was to take himself off to Stavka, then who would represent him in the capital and handle the day-to-day affairs of state? The man who knew nothing about war answered that by appointing someone who knew nothing about politics. He gave the job to his wife.

  The move was made almost casually within days of his arrival at headquarters and after a letter from her in which she wrote: ‘Do not fear for what remains behind…don’t laugh at silly old Wify but she has “trousers” on unseen…’18 His reply was as she had hoped. ‘Think my Wify, will you not come to the assistance of your hubby now that he is absent? What a pity that you have not been fulfilling this duty for a long time, or at least during the war!’19

  The invitation was eagerly accepted. ‘Oh, Sweetheart, I am so touched you want my help. I am always ready to do anything for you, only never liked
mixing up without being asked…’20 Since there was no formal announcement that Alexandra was now effectively Regent on the home front, it took some time before the public realised that henceforth Russia was to be ruled by a domineering, neurotic and hysterical Empress and behind her, hiding in her shadow, by the scandalous and hated figure of her hypnotic ‘holy man’, Grigory Rasputin.

  THE power of Rasputin had grown massively over the past ten years as again and again he appeared to demonstrate that only he could save Alexandra’s son from the ‘bleeding disease’. When Alexis lay at the point of death in 1912, after injuring himself while jumping into a boat, an anguished Alexandra sent Rasputin a telegram begging his help, and received back a cable to say that ‘the Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.’21 Shortly afterwards the crisis passed. A man who could save her son even by telegram was surely a man sent by God and she would ever after be utterly dependent on him.

  A distracted and desperate mother vulnerable to a charlatan? Rasputin was not, in fact, the first mystical figure to influence affairs at Tsarskoe Selo. His most notorious predecessor was a hypnotic French quack, a former butcher’s assistant from Lyons and a man well known to the French police. Calling himself Dr Philippe — his real name was Philippe Nizier-Vachod — he appeared on the scene in 1901, long before the birth of Alexis. As with Rasputin he was known as ‘our Friend’ by both Nicholas and Alexandra.

  Indeed, Alexandra’s references to Dr Philippe could easily be confused with her later references to Rasputin: ‘how rich life is since we know him and everything seems easier to bear’, she would write that year. Grand Duke Konstantin would note disturbingly that, after sessions with Dr Philippe in the nearby villa of Alexandra’s long-time companion Anna Vyrubova, Tsar and Empress would return ‘in an exalted state, as if in an ecstasy with radiant faces and shining eyes’.22