From ‘abdication’ grew the assumption, fed by triumphant Soviet propaganda, that the monarchy was finished. Even the British and French ambassadors seemed to think in consequence that Russia was now a republic. Both were to be corrected by Milyukov, the new foreign minister. ‘The Constituent Assembly alone will be qualified to change the political status of Russia’, he told Paléologue;8 and when he heard Buchanan referring to the new government as republican, ‘he caught me up, saying that it was only a Provisional Government pending the decision of the future Constituent Assembly’.9
Correcting the impression gathered by two experienced and senior ambassadors was one thing; it was quite another with the country at large. Michael had been wasting his time at the school desk it seemed. What he had signed was not his suspension of imperial power until the decision of a future constituent assembly, but his abdication. What was intended as temporary was taken as permanent. Everyone knew that, because it said so in the newspapers. Some people, reading the manifesto, would say that he had ‘refused the crown’ rather than abdicated, but the effect was the same. Michael had given up.
There were exceptions to this generally negative response. In The Times of London, for example, the judgement of Robert Wilton, their respected correspondent in Petrograd, was that ‘perhaps in the end it will be all for the best’. Accepting that while ‘at present we must be content to go on with the Provisional Government until quieter days supervene,’ he concluded that were it possible to bring about the Constituent Assembly ‘there could be little doubt as to the election of Grand Duke Michael to the Throne by an overwhelming majority’.10 Following events in Yalta, Princess Cantacuzène took much the same view — ‘we looked forward to the probability of the Constituent Assembly being in favour of a constitutional monarchy’.11
Besides, as Michael might wryly have reflected, the idea of having his succession confirmed by being ‘elected’ was exactly how the Romanov dynasty came into being. The first Romanov, his namesake Michael I, had been elected by a national assembly in 1613. After 300 years, a second ‘election’ of a second Michael would change the Romanovs from autocrats into constitutional monarchs, like the British. No one on March 3, 1917 could know that a future assembly would vote to retain the monarchy, but equally no one could know that it would not. Six months is a long time, and if Russia won great victories in the summer, and the public mood improved, the picture could well look very different. Re-reading Michael’s manifesto then, what it actually said might be better understood. However, that appeared a vain hope in the immediate aftermath of its publication.
Some people would never forgive Michael for becoming Emperor but not being Emperor. Grand Duke George wrote to his wife that while ‘Misha’s manifesto seems to have calmed the republicans, the others are angry with him…’12 The right-wing Duma member Vasily Maklakov, who was not at Millionnaya Street, called the manifesto ‘strange and criminal… an act of lunacy or treason, had not the authors been qualified and patriotic lawyers.’13 In Tsarskoe Selo, Grand Duke Paul’s wife Princess Paley, damned Michael as ‘a feeble creature’ and ‘a weakling’,14 though there was no surprise in her saying that.
In short, in some quarters it would be Michael who would be blamed for the fall of the House of Romanov. ‘Not us’ they would cry, ‘it was him’.
One exception in Michael’s corner was A. A. Mossolov, former head of the Court Chancellery, who observed that when Michael ‘became Emperor, those Grand Dukes who were in Petrograd failed to rally around him’15. Bimbo apart, that was true, although the excuse would be that either they could not get near him that day, or they did not know where he was.
But in casting blame, the ultimate responsibility for all that happened lay with Nicholas, and above all, Alexandra.
Brooding over events in faraway Persia, Dimitri was in no doubt about that. ‘The final catastrophe,’ he judged, ‘has been brought about by the wilful and short-sighted obstinacy of a woman. It has, naturally, swept away Tsarskoe Selo, and all of us, at one stroke.’16
MICHAEL’S manifesto, in empowering the Provisional Government as lawful, also bound it to do what it promised to do, and which limited its role to that of restoring order, continuing the war, and exercising its powers only until such time as the Constituent Assembly determined the status of Russia. In particular it had no rights to pre-empt any decision reserved to the elected Assembly when it came into being.
So it seemed on March 3. The reality was very different. Michael did not surrender the Romanovs, the new government would do that for him, yielding to the clamouring pressures of the Soviet. There would be no place in the new order for Grand Dukes: their rank, privilege, wealth, land and even liberty were now at the disposal of a government in hock to the Soviet. The meeting at Millionnaya Street had not intended it, but long before any constituent assembly could come into being, the Romanovs would be out of business. Indeed, that seemed to be the case almost immediately, such was the weakness of the new government.
On his return to Gatchina Michael had assumed that he would continue with some role in the army, or at least do so when conditions allowed it. Technically he was still Inspector-General of Cavalry with the rank of colonel-general, but he was willing to serve in any capacity. He was to be immediately disappointed; there would be no job for him or any other Grand Duke.
‘They do not allow us to go the front fearing that we might start a counter-revolution,’ wrote Grand Duke George from Gatchina, though no such idea has ‘even crossed our minds.’17 Perhaps so, but in Petrograd the government knew that the Soviet would never believe that.
On April 5, one month after he signed his manifesto, Michael noted with scarcely concealed bitterness: ‘Today I received my discharge from military service,’ adding caustically ‘with uniform’.18 It was another pointer to the way reality had overtaken the meeting at Millionnaya Street.
Next day, Michael and Natasha, together with cousin George, went by train to Petrograd, Michael’s first visit to the capital since his manifesto. There was no imperial carriage now; they would have to travel like everyone else, buying tickets, and finding seats where they could. They were intent on organising the removal of his furniture from his mother’s home at the Anichkov Palace before it was ‘liberated’ by the workers.19 It would be the first and only time that Natasha would ever set foot in the palace in which Michael had been born 38 years earlier.
As Michael settled down in his carriage at Gatchina, ‘a soldier came running to the compartment in which Misha sat by the window, and taking off his military fur cap, made a deep bow’. At the same station, a group of soldiers stood to attention as Grand Duke George came up to them. ‘They seemed delighted to talk to me,’ he wrote. ‘I could do anything with these soldiers who now want a republic with a Tsar!’20
For a Grand Duke to think it worth mentioning that soldiers had stood to attention when he approached them, or that one had bowed to Michael, was a measure of just how greatly discipline had deteriorated in the army over the past month. The cause of the collapse in ordinary standards was not the revolution itself, but the notorious Order No 1 which had been issued by the Petrograd Soviet on March 1 before the formation of the Provisional Government. Intended at the time to apply only to the Petrograd garrison, the ‘order’ had become widely interpreted as applying to all troops, including those in the front-line.
Guchkov, war minister in the new government, found out about Order No 1 only after it was published and he had failed to get it rescinded. On March 9, just a week after taking up his post, he had cabled Alekseev in Mogilev: ‘The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that this is permitted by the Soviet…in the military department it is possible at present to issue only such orders as basically do not contradict the decisions of the above-mentioned Soviet.’21
The effect was disastrous, for it essentially made officers subservient to the dictates of ‘soldier committees’ established in every mil
itary formation, which took away the control of arms from officers, and in some instances dictated what military action might, or might not, be taken against the enemy.
Off-duty soldiers were to be treated as civilians, with no requirement to salute or stand to attention; officers were ‘prohibited’ from speaking to soldiers ‘rudely’. In some units, ‘soldier committees’ insisted on electing their own officers, and expelling those they judged to be too strict or who were suspected of wanting to get on with the war. No wonder, then, that there was no place in this new ‘democratic people’s army’ for Michael or any other Grand Duke, including ‘Uncle Nikolasha’, reappointed Supreme Commander by Nicholas before he abdicated. The new government had simply sacked him.22
Paléologue estimated that there were well over a million deserters roaming Russia. ‘Units have been turned into political debating societies,’ reported the British military observer Alfred Knox after a tour of the northern front. Front-line infantry refused to allow the artillery to shoot at the enemy in case the enemy shot back, and fraternised daily with the Germans facing them. As for the troops in Petrograd, ‘the tens of thousands of able-bodied men in uniform who saunter about the streets without a thought of going to the front…will be a disgrace for all-time to the Russian people and its government’.23
Michael thought the same, and said so in a letter to a British friend, Major Simpson. ‘I want you to know that I am very much ashamed of my countrymen, who are showing too little patriotism ever since the revolution, and who are forgetting their agreement with the Allies, who have done so much to help them. But nonetheless I hope that the return of their good feelings will prevent them becoming traitors.’24
One consolation for Michael was that his own Savage Division had remained immune to the breakdown in discipline. Officers and men were as rock-steady after the revolution as they had been before. He would also have been proud to know that when an officer returned from Petrograd to his Muslim regiment, he found that ‘one question seemed to interest the men most — the fate of Grand Duke Michael’. When he replied that he was in Gatchina and that he was ‘safe for the moment’ the men would shake their heads and mumble, ‘Allah preserve him — he is a real dzhigit. Why didn’t he come to us when it all happened: we would never have given him up.’25
SITTING in Michael’s house, Grand Duke George decided that he could no longer stand living in this new Russia. He had accepted the emergence of the new government ‘but what he had seen after that,’ he wrote to his wife in England, ‘is enough to make your hair stand on end. I would like to leave the country at once.’ He was also tiring of Gatchina: ‘Misha is so nice but his wife is so vengeful about the Romanovs’. 26 George was not sure how much more he could take of her outbursts.
His natural hope was that he would go to England, where his wife, the daughter of the late King George of Greece, had been stranded since the outbreak of war. Accordingly, three weeks after the new government came into being, he went to see Buchanan to seek permission to travel to England.
Although he was not directly connected to the British royals, his wife Marie was a niece of the Dowager Queen Alexandra, as was Michael. So, in the hope of increasing his chances, he told Buchanan that Michael was also keen on going back to his waiting estate in Sussex. He told Buchanan that he saw no hope for Russia with the Soviet pulling the strings. ‘Everything was being confiscated…and to think that these brutes will probably govern the country…it will become a country of savages…every decent person will leave.’27
George’s inclusion of Michael as being his co-applicant was not entirely as he presented it to Buchanan. Walking in the palace park, George had talked to Michael about getting away, and Michael had told him that he was also thinking of going to London. The difference between the two was that George wanted to get out altogether, whereas Michael was thinking only of a short trip, without his family, and with the intention of getting back as soon as he could.
The reason in his case was that, freed of all responsibility, Natasha had urged him to get specialist treatment for his ‘damned stomach pains’ which had so often laid him low in the past. There had been previous discussions in the last couple of years about having treatment in Britain but because of his military duties it had been ‘impossible for him to get to the great specialists who could have dealt with it radically,’ his stepdaughter Tata recalled28. Now, with time on his hands, Natasha saw the chance for him to get the treatment he needed.
In those early days of the new government, Michael assumed that there would be no difficulty in getting permission to go abroad for a few weeks perhaps. After all, he would be leaving his wife and family behind, and that in itself would be sufficient surety that he would be coming back. The Soviet might bark protests, but surely Kerensky would satisfy them that it was for genuine medical treatment, and nothing more than that. In the event the refusal he feared did not come from the Soviet, but from his cousin King George V at Buckingham Palace. The king had shut the door on any Romanovs coming to Britain. He had enough problems with his own throne.
THE Romanov who posed the greatest difficulty for King George was ex-Tsar Nicholas, notwithstanding the close family ties and long friendship, and the loyalty he had shown as an ally. His fall from power had been welcomed by liberals worldwide — by American President Woodrow Wilson as well as by British prime minister Lloyd George. But liberal sentiment was not the problem. ‘Bloody Nicholas’ was a hated figure among British socialists, holding as they did an idealised view of the Russian revolution; and what they were not prepared to accept was any idea that he might be offered refuge in Britain.
On March 9, six days after his abdication, Nicholas had returned to Tsarskoe Selo, escorted by Duma deputies on his imperial train. With that he began what was in effect a prison sentence. He and his family — the children no less than their parents — were confined to their apartments in the palace and restricted for exercise to a small area of the park outside. They were guarded day and night, and while the bayonets were protection from potential attacks by Soviet extremists they were also a bar to the outside world. The family were captives, under threat that they face worse than house arrest. The Soviet continued to clamour for their confinement in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul.
There were endless petty humiliations. Soldiers enjoyed taunting them; crowds of spectators at the outer railings would peer in, hissing and booing. It was an ordeal borne with dignity, and in the confidence that it was only temporary — that they would very shortly be sent aboard into exile. Pierre Gilliard, the Swiss tutor employed at Tsarskoe Selo, would remember that ‘there was endless talk about our imminent transfer to England’.29
The Provisional Government, worried by Soviet threats, encouraged that idea as the best way of keeping the family out of reach of vengeful revolutionaries. The British government quickly signalled that it was willing to take them, assuming in doing so that the king, Nicholas’s first cousin, would surely support that — they were family.
Buckingham Palace, however, was aghast at the prospect. King George was alarmed not just by the inevitable left-wing protests which would greet any move to give ‘Bloody Nicholas’ sanctuary but that the British royals were themselves facing increased hostility over the fact that, although British by birth and upbringing, they were all of German descent. When even a dachshund risked being kicked in the street the British king, with a German father-in-law, and German relatives all around him, was understandably sensitive about being damned as a German. British republicanism was not deep-seated but it was very noisy.
It would not be long before anti-German sentiment would be so great that the British royals in the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, as Queen Victoria thought it to be, would reinvent themselves under the more agreeable name of the House of Windsor. By Order-in-Council of July 17, 1917, Alexandra’s eldest sister Victoria, of Hesse-Darmstadt until she married Prince Louis Battenberg, disappeared, to be replaced by the terribly English-sounding Marchioness of Milfor
d Haven, though she had never been there. Other Battenbergs were translated into Mountbatten and Carisbrooke; the German title of Teck became Athlone.
With this looming ahead, King George was not pleased to find himself caught up in the problems of a Russian autocrat with a German wife and for whom there was almost no sympathy in any quarter. However, his objections were at first set aside by the British government on the grounds that the offer having been made, it could not be withdrawn.
It was at this point on March 23 that the cable came into London from Buchanan asking that the names of Grand Dukes Michael and George be added to the list of those seeking refuge in London.
Now two ex-Emperors knocking on the door? It gave opportunity for Buckingham Palace to re-open the case for barring Nicholas. ‘I do trust that the whole question…will be reconsidered,’ wrote the king’s private secretary Lord Stamfordham to the foreign secretary Balfour. ‘It will very hard on the King and arouse much public comment if not resentment.’30
More shots came in from Buckingham Palace. ‘The residence in this country of the ex-Emperor and Empress…would undoubtedly compromise the position of the King and Queen…we must be allowed to withdraw from the consent previously given.’31 Yet George V was fully aware of the dangers facing his cousin if he was not granted refuge. ‘I fear that if poor Nicky goes into the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul he will not come out alive,’ he later wrote in his diary.32
Could the problem be avoided if Nicholas went instead to France? The reply from the British ambassador in Paris was that ‘The Empress is not only a Boche by birth but in sentiment… she is regarded as a criminal or a criminal lunatic, and the ex-Emperor as a criminal from his weakness and submission to her promptings.’33
As the British agonised, the Provisional Government itself stepped away from the idea of sending Nicholas abroad. The Soviet would have none of it, and with that the new government pledged that it would not again give permission for any member of the imperial family to leave Russia without the agreement of the Soviet. That conveniently allowed the British to let their invitation to wither on the vine. The Romanovs were stranded.
The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II Page 21