Leaving Stavka tomorrow in the middle of a crisis and out of touch while he travelled 450 miles in a train? Every hour was vital, every hour lost potentially fatal. Michael replied immediately. ‘I am convinced that it may be advisable to delay His Majesty the Emperor’s journey to Tsarskoe Selo for several days.’33
Forty minutes later General Alekseev passed on Nicholas’s reply. It was uncompromising, almost dismissive.
Firstly. In view of the extraordinary circumstances His Majesty the Emperor does not consider it possible to delay his departure and will leave tomorrow at half past two p.m. Secondly. His Imperial Majesty will not deal with any measures touching on changes to his personal staff until his arrival in Tsarskoe Selo. Thirdly. ADC General Ivanov is leaving for Petrograd as Commander-in-Chief of the Petrograd Area and has a reliable battalion with him. Fourthly. As of tomorrow four infantry regiments and four cavalry regiments from amongst our most reliable units will begin moving from the Northern and Western Fronts to Petrograd.
Reading that, Michael knew that his brother had ignored everything he had said, and that his wire had been a waste of time, as had the discussion at the conference in the Marie Palace. Michael had been told to mind his own business.
Alekseev was clearly unhappy for he added a message of his own, directly supporting Michael’s original proposals. Allow me to conclude with a personal request that, when making personal reports to His Imperial Majesty, Your Imperial Highness will be so kind as to give firm support to the ideas which you expressed in your preceding message, both as regards to the replacement of the present members of the Council of Ministers and as regards the method by which a new Council is to be selected and may the Lord God aid Your Imperial Highness in this important matter.
Michael in reply repeated his concern that Nicholas was leaving Mogilev ‘since under the present conditions literally every hour counts…’ Alekseev agreed and promised to raise the matter at the morning conference because ‘I realise perfectly well… that time lost cannot be compensated for’.34
It was a dispiriting end to a long night, in which Michael had achieved precisely nothing. He summarised his efforts in his diary, concluding with one word: Alas.35
And alas indeed, for by refusing to empower his brother the Tsar now had no government at all. When the lights failed at around midnight in the Marie Palace the last of the ministers there simply drifted away into the night and they never met again. Thus, when at 11.35 that evening in Mogilev the Tsar sent off a telegram to his prime minister saying that ‘I personally bestow upon you all the necessary powers for civil rule’,36 there was no prime minister, no power and no rule. Prince Golitsin had gone home. Over the next 24 hours he and most of the Tsar’s other ministers would be arrested by the revolutionary mob and for some their ultimate fate would be a firing squad.
THE immediate question for Michael was where he went now. It was impossible to return to Gatchina immediately ‘because of heavy machine-gun fire and grenade explosions’. His secretary Johnson had hidden their car in the courtyard of the Moika building but at 3 a.m. when ‘things had quietened down somewhat’, he decided to make an attempt to reach the station, still hoping to get home if he could. However, as his car and a military escort drove through unlit streets a revolutionary patrol tried to stop them. Michael accelerated and got away, but his military escort was arrested. ‘We could not proceed further and decided to make for the Winter Palace.’37
He arrived to find the war minister Belyaev with the dejected garrison commander Khabalov ‘and a force of 1,000 troops’. With only a few machine-guns and little artillery they had been defending the Admiralty but were marched out when their commander General Zankevich decided that it would be more symbolic ‘to die in defence of the palace’.
Michael recognised a different kind of symbolism — that it had been from the Winter Palace that troops had fired on the crowds marching into the palace square in January 1905, killing men, women and children. Michael had been with his brother at Tsarskoe Selo that day and twelve years later the memory, and the lesson of the revolution which followed, remained with him. Whatever the events of the next hours and days, if there was to be any chance of restoring order, he was not prepared to allow another ‘Bloody Sunday’, and hand the revolutionaries a propaganda victory that could only add fuel to the flames. Moreover, the Winter Palace was indefensible. Across the Neva were the rebel guns of the Fortress of St Peter and St. Paul. They could reduce the Winter Palace to rubble if they chose to open fire.
Tersely, the garrison commander was told to remove his troops back to the stronger and less politically sensitive Admiralty, ‘the poor General Khabalov’ being ‘very grateful’ to avoid a battle he could only lose.38
That done, where was he to go? It was 5 a.m. and he needed refuge close by and quickly. The best idea seemed the apartment of his old friend Princess Putyatina at 12 Millionnaya Street, just 500 yards away, and opposite the palace of Bimbo, banished by the Tsar for defending Dimitri.
He and his weary secretary Johnson slipped out of the Winter Palace into the courtyard of the adjacent Hermitage then, watching out for revolutionary patrols, waited until their path was clear before running across the snow-covered road and knocking on the door of No 12.39
The concierge heard their banging and recognising Michael’s voice opened up before leading them up two flights of stairs to the apartment of Princess Putyatina, using her pass-key to admit them inside. The princess, whose husband Pavel was away at the front, was alone with her young daughter. ‘I woke with a start hearing violent knocking on my bedroom door. At this noise, seized with fright, I could only imagine that armed soldiers had burst into my apartment.’ She was relieved when she recognised the voice of Johnson. Dressing hurriedly she went into the study where Michael was waiting. He was ‘very tired and seemed very upset’, but apologised with his ‘usual good grace’ for having disturbed her, adding: ‘Are you not afraid, Princess, of putting yourself at such risk by having such a dangerous guest?’40
Her maid produced coffee and they were gratefully sipping it when they heard boots on the stairs and the sounds of shouting from the apartment above. A revolutionary squad, forcing their way through the service entrance at the rear of the building, had come to arrest the Tsar’s chamberlain, Nicholas Stolypin, a brother of the former prime minister Peter Stolypin, assassinated in a Kiev theatre six years earlier. He was dragged away, but as they held their breath there was no knock on their door — or not yet.
Break-ins of suspected homes would be commonplace over the next days as mutineers went around the city looking for officials and ministers associated with the Tsar’s government, or who were simply people judged to be enemies of the revolution. Princess Putyatina had so far been lucky, her concierge telling rampaging mobs that in her apartment was only a soldier’s wife and child. She was not likely to remain so, however, if the mutineers learned that the Tsar’s brother was there, in an unguarded building they could enter with one blow of a rifle butt.
For the moment that was a problem for the morrow. Silently, but gratefully, Michael and Johnson collapsed exhausted on settees and went to sleep.
11. ADDRESS UNKNOWN
AS Michael was slipping out of the Winter Palace and making his way to Millionnaya Street in the pre-dawn of Tuesday, February 28, the train carrying his brother back to Tsarskoe Selo was leaving Mogilev, its windows darkened, its passengers asleep. Another train, carrying members of his suite, had set off an hour earlier, at 4 a.m.1 After the telegraph exchange with Michael, the start-time had been moved forward from 2.30 p.m. because it had been decided to take a roundabout route back, so as to leave the direct line to Petrograd clear for the relief force ordered to the capital. The change would mean adding nine hours and 200 miles to the normal journey. With luck he would arrive home at around eight o’ clock the following morning, Wednesday.
‘Every hour is precious,’ Michael had told his brother on the wire from the war ministry on Monday night, and h
e had urged him not to leave Mogilev at all, so that he could be in direct communication throughout the crisis. On his train, Nicholas would be virtually incommunicado. Russia no longer had a government and over the next crucial twenty-seven hours or more it would, for all practical purposes, be without an emperor. If, that is, all went to plan.
Nicholas had gone to bed in the train at 3.15 a.m. having talked late with General Nikolai Ivanov,2 the former commander on the south-western front and the man now charged with restoring order in the capital and beyond. What Nicholas hoped was that when he reached Tsarskoe Selo next morning he would hear that Ivanov had crushed the rebellion.
Ivanov had been given a crack battalion comprising 800 men who had each won the Cross of St George,3 and from Mogilev Alekseev had commanded the despatch of reliable battle-hardened formations to be sent on the direct rail route to the capital, giving Ivanov another four infantry and four cavalry regiments, plus artillery.4
Late that Tuesday afternoon, Alexandra received at Tsarskoe Selo a confident telegram: ‘Left this morning at 5. Thoughts always together. Glorious weather. Hope you are feeling well and quiet. Many troops sent from front. Fondest love. Nicky. The telegram, sent from Vyazma at 3 p.m. arrived at Tsarskoe Selo less than two hours later, at 4.49 p.m.5 Some things still seemed to be working.
It was certainly reassuring news. Vyazma was 420 miles away, and if the trains kept to schedule, Nicholas would be home as planned, for breakfast on Wednesday. Darkness had fallen when the telegram arrived, but Alexandra knew that all around the palace were well-armed and reliable troops who would stand guard throughout the night.
The men protecting the imperial palace were hand-picked and their personal loyalty to the Tsar was beyond question. There were Guardsmen, Cossacks of the Emperor’s Escort, artillerymen, riflemen, and the tall marines of the Garde Equipage, whose proud commander was Grand Duke Kirill.6 They were not just crack troops — as Alexandra said to her loyal confidante, Lili Dehn, they were ‘our personal friends’.7
Rodzyanko doubted that, given the tumult in the capital. He sent a message urging Alexandra to evacuate the palace and put herself and her family on a train8 — which made no sense at all at Tsarskoe Selo, given that the Tsar was heading towards the palace in his train, and Ivanov and his battalion of heroes were hastening towards them, followed by eight regiments of frontline troops.
Yet there were grounds for concern. Truckloads of mutineers had arrived in the town itself, but their revolutionary fervour had been diverted into looting the wine shops.9 There was the sound of shooting beyond the palace gates, but as darkness fell, within the ring of troops, the palace itself seemed entirely secure. In the late evening, with a black fur-coat thrown over her nurse’s uniform, Alexandra and her 17-year-old daughter Marie walked among the troops, praising them for their loyalty.10
When she came back, Alexandra seemed ‘possessed by some inward exaltation. She was radiant. They are all our friends…so devoted to us, ’ she told Lili Dehn.11 By morning, Nicholas would be back, and Ivanov marching into town. All was well.
Nicholas still expected to be back on schedule. At around 4 a.m. on Wednesday morning he was less than 100 miles away, having covered 540 miles since leaving Mogilev. It was then that the train stopped, at the town of Malaya Vishera, an alarmed aide hurrying into his carriage to tell him that revolutionaries had blocked the line ahead.12 It was the bitterest of moments for Nicholas; no more than five hours from home, and he could go no further.
Since he had no troops save for a few train guards, there was no hope of fighting their way forward. That being so, there was only one choice for them: the two trains would have to go back to Bologoe, halfway between Petrograd and Moscow, and then head west for Pskov, headquarters of General Nikolai Ruzsky’s Northern Army. It was the nearest safe haven, though it would still leave Nicholas 170 miles from home and worse off than if he had stayed in Mogilev where he could command the whole of his armies. His journey had been entirely wasted.
‘To Pskov, then,’ he said curtly and retired back to his sleeping car.13 But once there he put his real feelings into his diary. ‘Shame and dishonour,’ he wrote despairingly.14
The return to Bologoe would take around five hours, and from there it was 221 miles on the branch line to the ancient town of Pskov. For the next and decisive 15 hours the Emperor of All the Russias would once again vanish into the empty snow-covered countryside, a second day lost.
At Tsarskoe Selo, an increasingly worried Alexandra would wait for a man who was not coming, and when she dashed off a telegram to him to find out where he was, ordering it to be sent immediately to ‘His Imperial Majesty’, it was returned, with the stark message, scrawled across it in blue pencil: ‘Address of person mentioned unknown’.15
WITH no government and a nomadic Tsar lost in a railway train going nowhere, power in Petrograd passed on Tuesday February 28 to the revolution, with competing powers in the Tauride Palace trying to establish their own agendas for the reshaping of Russia. Home of a Duma that was no more, the parliamentary building now housed a noisy mass of workers, soldiers and students, joined together in a new organisation, a Soviet on the lines which had emerged in the 1905 revolution. The few hundred respectable deputies who backed the Temporary Committee of the Duma now jostled for places in rooms and hallways packed with a thousand excited street orators, mutineers and strike leaders. It was chaos and would remain so for days to come.
When Vladimir Nabokov, a lawyer destined to play a leading part in the events of that week, arrived at the smoke-filled Tauride Palace it looked to him like an improvised camp: ‘rubbish, straw; the air was thick like some kind of a dense fog; there was a smell of soldiers’ boots, cloth, sweat; from somewhere we could hear the hysterical voices of orators, addressing a meeting…everywhere crowding and bustling confusion…’16
In that crush of people, the young man who was beginning to stand out as the dominant figure was Aleksandr Kerensky aged 36. As both a member of the Temporary Committee and as vice-chairman of the new ‘Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’, he bestrode both camps. He was also the finger of justice.
When the mutineers dragged in their first important prisoner, the chairman of the State Council Ivan Shcheglovitov, Kerensky strode up to him and shouted dramatically: ‘Your life is not in danger. The Imperial Duma does not shed blood’.17 The arrested man was led off to the Government Pavilion, a separate building with some anterooms previously reserved for ministers who had come to address the Duma. It was connected to the main hall by a glass-roofed passage and technically was not part of the parliamentary building, so that deputies avoided the stigma of ‘turning the Duma into a prison’.
There would be hundreds of men like Shcheglovitov in the next hours and days — hunted down and brought to the Tauride Palace as prisoners, fearing to be shot, and it was to Kerensky’s credit that he protected them from violence. Even the hated former interior minister Protopopov — the man who had so recently fallen on his knees before the Empress, calling out ‘Oh Majesty, I see Christ behind you’ and now the man most likely to be torn to bits — was safe once inside the Tauride Palace. Found hiding in a tailor’s shop, Protopopov, ‘trembling with terror’ was almost unrecognisable: a shrunken, frightened figure, all posturing gone. Kerensky pushed forward and stood over him. ‘Don’t touch that man’, he cried with a raised arm that commanded what was otherwise a rabble.
The crowd fell back silent as Kerensky pushed on, the cringing Protopopov trailing in his wake. ‘It looked as if he were leading him to execution, to something dreadful…Kerensky dashed past like the flaming torch of revolutionary justice and behind him they dragged that miserable little figure in the rumpled greatcoat, surrounded by bayonets.’18
Goremykin, prime minister until the previous year, was another prisoner brought in, though at first he was treated with special consideration on the insistence of the ‘old school’ Duma deputies. It would be a brief respite.
Kerensky
found him in Rodzyanko’s room. ‘In a corner sat a very old gentleman, with exceedingly long whiskers. He wore a fur coat, and looked like a gnome.’ Kerensky, noting that he had taken the trouble to hang round his neck the Order of St Andrew, refused to be impressed. ‘In the name of the revolutionary people I declare you under arrest’, he shouted.19 Rodzyanko, faced with this challenge to his own authority as leader of the Duma committee, backed down helplessly. Two soldiers led away the confused and crestfallen old Goremykin to join the others.
Kerensky was everywhere. ‘I was summoned and sent for from all sides. As in a trance, regardless of day or night…I rushed about the Duma. Sometimes I almost lost consciousness for fifteen or twenty minutes until a glass of brandy was forced down my throat and I was made to drink a cup of black coffee.’20
Kerensky would become more and more excitable as the hours and days passed. Nabokov, seeing him for the first time, was struck by his ‘loss of emotional balance’. He was also astonished when Kerensky, coming out of one meeting ‘excited, agitated, hysterical,’ put up his hands, grabbed the corners of his wing collar, and ripped them off,’ achieving a deliberately proletarian look, instead of that of a dandy’.21
His power, nevertheless, was enormous for there was no doubting among the Duma deputies that the new Soviet, with a thousand members milling around the Tauride Palace, was master if it chose to be. Kerensky was the bridge between two rivals in an uneasy coalition, and for the Duma members he was a bridge they could not afford to cross. The Temporary Committee of the Duma had the better claim to government, but its members knew that in this revolution they could only lead where Kerensky was willing to follow.
TRAPPED in Millionnaya Street, Michael knew little that day of events in the world aside. After a few restless hours on a settee, he was awakened by ‘the noise of heavy traffic and movement of cars and lorries filled with soldiers who were shooting mainly in the air and there were also explosions of hand-grenades. The soldiers shouted and cheered, waved red flags and had red ribbons and bows on their breasts and buttonholes’.22
The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II Page 14