The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

by Donald Crawford

  17. FAREWELL MY BROTHER

  UNLIKE the miserable house-arrest suffered by Nicholas and his family in Tsarskoe Selo, Michael and his family in Gatchina lived very much as before. In many respects his own day-to-day life changed little as the weeks went on. He was free to move within the Petrograd area, though not beyond without a permit. He could drive into the country in his Rolls-Royce or his new Packard — ordered before the war, but which had unexpectedly turned up at his house a year earlier; he could have friends to stay, and afford staff and a houseload of servants. Walking about the town, people still bowed to him in the street,1 and while there were now guards posted in Nikolaevskaya Street they were there only to keep away hooligans and looters. As even George admitted in one letter to his wife, ‘the government is trying to be as polite as possible with us, I must own that they have been quite correct towards us’.2

  Although Michael’s annual income from the imperial purse had stopped, as it had for all Romanovs, and his imperial yacht requisitioned along with his train carriage, he still had ample cash in the bank. He also continued to receive some income from his retained private holdings, including his Ukraine sugar factory and his Brasovo estate. His real concern about Brasovo was that he was not permitted to go there to look after its affairs and its people as he usually did. The government in deference to the Soviet had refused a permit.

  The man a future constituent assembly might therefore confirm as Emperor was thus virtually a prisoner in his own country, even though he was not confined as was his brother and his family in Tsarskoe Selo. Nonetheless, in itself that made a mockery of the promises given by the Duma men on March 3. The powers he had vested in them to ensure orderly and responsible government had clearly been hijacked by the disorderly and irresponsible men in the Soviet.

  Yet otherwise he could not complain about his life in Gatchina. He had bought another house for his staff, on Baggout Street where Natasha had lived when she was married to Wulfert, and at the end of April he rented another in Kseniinsky Street, by the Priorate. ‘The house has two floors, we’re thinking of it for our servants,’ he noted in his diary for May 5, 1917.3 He had spent the day inspecting the house, planning to enlarge the garden, and discussing with Natasha the final furnishings, due for delivery nine days later.4

  But would they be left alone as they had been? There were worrying signs that the Soviet was becoming ever more assertive and demanding, now that the Bolsheviks were back in Petrograd and challenging them. Lenin and Trotsky, returned from exile by the Germans in the hope of stirring up even more trouble, were formidable rivals to the Soviet. That did not bode well, and while Michael had no intention of leaving Russia permanently, it seemed prudent to have some sort of insurance policy in case matters worsened.

  An exit permit to Finland —the gateway to Sweden, Norway and then England— suggested itself. To get one, he would need to pull strings and do so discreetly, without the comrades finding out. General Polovtsov, his old friend from the Savage Division, had recently been appointed commander of the Petrograd garrison and on an official trip to Gatchina in June he was contacted by Michael’s ADC Prince Vyazemsky.

  ‘It was completely out of the question that I should openly visit the Grand Duke, whom I liked so much,’ said Polovtsov. ‘A plot would have at once been suspected, but I was delighted to think that a secret meeting with his ADC could be arranged.’ It took place in the Gatchina palace. In the course of this meeting Vyazemsky asked if Michael could be given a permit to cross into Finland with two cars.

  Back in Petrograd, Polovtsov casually approached Kerensky. ‘By the way, I have had a request from the Grand Duke Michael to deliver him a permit for crossing the frontier into Finland with his family in two cars. You always say that you admire him so much for his correctness and straightforwardness, so I expect you will have no objection…’

  Kerensky looked at him through half-closed eyes. ‘If I were not in Petrograd at the moment, what would you do?’

  ‘I would deliver it on my own responsibility.’

  ‘Then deliver it on your own responsibility,’ Kerensky replied.5

  There were, however, no such discreet concessions for Nicholas. After three months’ imprisonment at Tsarskoe Selo no solution had been found to the question of what to do with the ex-Tsar and his family. In July, an attempted coup by the Bolsheviks in Petrograd was to force a decision. The uprising, crushed by loyal government troops after two days of serious disorders, was a serious setback for the Bolsheviks, and a humiliation for its leadership with Lenin, shaving off his beard as disguise, fleeing by car to Finland.

  But it also settled the immediate future of Nicholas. Believing that the Bolshevik failure might encourage a monarchist counter-revolution, Kerensky decided to remove the ex-Tsar from the political chess board while there was opportunity to do so. He chose Tobolsk, in the far-off Urals; his reason, he would say, was that it was ‘an out-and-out backwater’.6 The move was fixed for August 1.

  Michael heard of this ‘only by accident’ in the afternoon of the previous day. With only hours to spare, he drove at once to Petrograd with Natasha and Johnson, going directly to the Winter Palace, home and office to the all-powerful Kerensky, now master of both the Provisional Government and the Soviet which, with the Bolshevik threat, had come to find itself needing him as much as he had once needed them. It was difficult in these days to distinguish one from the other.

  While Michael and Natasha waited in their car, Johnson was sent into the Winter Palace to find Kerensky and to persuade him to allow Michael to see his brother that night.7

  Kerensky had taken to working at the desk of Michael’s father Alexander III and sleeping in his bed. The red flag flying over the Winter Palace was also lowered whenever he was out of town, as had happened when the Tsar would leave in imperial days.8 It was as if Kerensky had become Tsar, which in a sense he had: he was the virtual dictator and as much autocrat as Nicholas had ever been.

  The Provisional Government which had met Michael in Millionnaya Street was largely dissolved. Only three of the 12 original ministers remained in office — Kerensky as prime minister, war minister and navy minister; Tereshchenko, formerly finance minister was now foreign minister; and Nekrasov who remained transport minister. Milyukov and Guchkov had resigned in disgust within the first two months; Prince Lvov had quit as prime minister after the abortive Bolshevik uprising in July, which left him at best as no more than a figurehead in a government dominated by Kerensky. The others had just vanished, to be replaced by men from the Soviet, though no Bolsheviks joined the government for they had refused to ‘collaborate’.

  This was no longer the Provisional Government, bound by the constitution handed to them by Michael — it was the Kerensky Government, bound by no one save himself and his lackeys. The so-called Kerensky Offensive, launched against the Germans in June, had failed. If anything, that meant that his grip had to tighten; since there was no victory, other than against the Bolsheviks, his eyes had turned inwards. The enemy, he believed, was now within.

  It was around 7.30 p.m. when Johnson was led in to see Kerensky. Yes, he understood, and saw no objection. A meeting was arranged for midnight at Tsarskoe Selo, which was the earliest that Kerensky could be there, and he insisted on being present.

  After Johnson re-emerged into the palace square, Michael drove to Matveev’s apartment on the Fontanka, where they all had dinner. At 10 p.m. Michael and Natasha drove north to Tsarskoe Selo, stopping at Grand Duke Boris’s English-style villa on Town Street. From there, at midnight, Michael was taken alone to the Alexander Palace by the Guard Commandant, Colonel Eugen Kobylinsky.9 Entering through the kitchen, they went through the basement to the stairs leading to Nicholas’s study. In the anteroom they were met by Kerensky.

  It was some five months since the brothers had seen each other, the last occasion being in February 1917, when Michael had gone to Tsarskoe Selo to beg Nicholas to make the concessions necessary to save the throne. Nicholas had then dism
issed his arguments as alarmist, as he had dismissed all those before. Now he was an ex-Tsar, a prisoner, unable to command anyone, and helplessly awaiting despatch with his entire family into distant exile.

  Kerensky, making small talk, accompanied Michael into the study, and then retreated to a side table and pretended to be absorbed in a book.10 As the door closed behind them, 13-year-old Alexis, the boy who should have been Emperor, came into the anteroom and asked Kobylinsky: ‘Is that Uncle Misha who has just come in?’ Told that it was, he hid himself behind the door. ‘I want to see him when he goes out,’ he said, peering through a crack in the door at the study beyond.11

  Although Kerensky sat with his head seemingly buried in his book, privacy was impossible. However low their voices, Michael and Nicholas knew he could hear everything they said, so they did not say much in consequence. There had been an awkward silence at first, then ten minutes of polite conversation, neither sufficiently at ease to think of anything that actually mattered. ‘How is Alix? How is mother?’ Their conversation never rose above the trite. ‘They stood fidgeting all the while, and sometimes one would take hold of the other’s hand or the buttons of his uniform,’ Kerensky, sneaking glances over his book, would say later.

  After ten minutes, Kerensky motioned that the meeting was over. ‘May I see the children?’ asked Michael, not knowing that Alexis was outside the door, looking in.

  ‘No,’ answered Kerensky. ‘I cannot prolong the interview.’12

  Michael and Nicholas clasped hands, and murmured their goodbyes. Then Michael, his eyes filled with tears,13 turned and left as he had come. Alexis, waved away by Kobylinsky, retreated out of sight, hoping that some call would come for him from Uncle Misha. But there was no call; Michael had not known he was there.

  That night, all he said to his diary was that ‘I found that Nicky looked rather well’.14 He would never see his brother again, though of course he could not know that it was Nicholas who would briefly outlive him.

  Nor could he know, as he drove back to Gatchina in the eaerly hours of August 1, that he was about to become a prisoner himself.

  18. KERENSKY’S CAPTIVE

  THREE weeks later, on Monday, August 21, Michael stayed at home while Natasha, with Johnson as escort, went off by train to Petrograd. Shopping, with lunch afterwards at the Astoria? He preferred a stroll around the town, and pottering in the garden. At seven o’clock that evening, as he was awaiting their return, a column of trucks roared into Nikolaevskaya Street, and braked at his front door. Armed troops, some 60 in number, jumped down and surrounded the house, bayonets drawn, as Andrei Kosmin, deputy chief of the Petrograd District, accompanied by the local Gatchina commandant, walked to the front door, to be met by a startled Michael. Kosmin, brandishing an order for his arrest on the orders of Kerensky, told him that he was now confined to his house, under guard.1

  Half an hour later, a car drew up and Natasha and Johnson, alarmed by sight of the troops, hurried into the house. The waiting Kosmin stiffly nodded, told them that they too were under arrest, and then marched off, leaving the guard to the local and somewhat embarrassed commandant. He could only shrug at Michael’s questions; there was nothing he could do about it — the written order was signed by Boris Savinkov, a former revolutionary terrorist who was now ‘Director of the War Ministry’. The order read:

  To the Commander-in-Chief of all Forces of the Petrograd District. Based on the resolution of the Provisional Government an order is given to arrest the former Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich as a person whose activities are a threat to the defence of the country…and to the freedoms won by the revolution. This person must be kept under the strictest house arrest…This order must be declared to the former Grand Duke, who should be kept under arrest until a further special order. 2

  A bewildered Michael, now styled a ‘former’ Grand Duke, though there had been no decree to that effect and nor could there lawfully be since it was not within the power of the Provisional Government to pre-empt any decision reserved to the future Constituent Assembly, could not understand what any of this was about. There had been no warning, no hint of trouble, so why was Kerensky suddenly turning on him?

  In fact, the order was a panic measure by a government now fearful of a ‘counter-revolution’ in favour of the monarchists. That being so, Michael was a threat, a rallying point for those who wanted to be rid of Kerensky and his discredited, oppressive and incompetent government. Yes, Kerensky had scored a victory over the Bolsheviks in July, with its leader Lenin in flight to Finland, but that was in-fighting between one brand of socialists and another, and for monarchists there was not much to choose between either.

  A week earlier General Lavr Kornilov, the recently-appointed Supreme Commander, had been given a hero’s reception by the rightist delegates at the State Conference held in Moscow, and in consequence Kerensky had become convinced that ‘the next attempt at a blow would come from the right, and not from the left’.3

  His suspicions were fuelled by reports that Mogilev was a hotbed of monarchist conspirators, a view encouraged by complaints that ‘in the evenings, in order to tease the local democrats,’4 the officers opened the windows and played on the piano the old national anthem, God Save The Tsar, and not the Marseillaise, which the revolutionaries had adopted in its place.

  Michael was arrested in this climate of an imagined monarchist counter-revolution, though the immediate cause three days earlier had been a farcical ‘plot’ to rescue Nicholas and his family from Tobolsk. The central figure was Margarita Khitrovo, a former maid-of-honour at the imperial court. The blindly-devoted Margarita journeyed to Tobolsk taking to Nicholas and Alexandra a large number of letters concealed in a pillow-case; within hours of her arrival on August 18, her hotel room was searched and the letters discovered. Arrested, she was sent back to Petrograd the following day.5

  Although the letters turned out to be merely innocent correspondence, in the frantic atmosphere of Petrograd the news of her detention at Tobolsk was taken as evidence of a major counter-revolutionary plot.’ Highly exaggerated tales of this conspiracy reached the government’, admitted Kerensky later, but that was not enough to change his attitude towards Michael.6

  Angry rather than alarmed, since he knew nothing of any so-called plot, Michael wrote a letter of protest to Kerensky demanding an end to his arrest and the withdrawal of the guards, but was told in reply only that ‘the present position of democracy and the state is such that it was found necessary to keep me in isolation’. They had been caught up, as he put it four days later, ‘in a plot which never existed’.7

  As it happened, they were now to be embroiled in another plot which never existed, the so-called ‘Kornilov Affair’, an event which this time was to prove more tragedy than farce.

  At 3 a.m. on Tuesday, August 29, eight days after the order placing them under house arrest, Michael and Natasha were awaked by an excited Gatchina commandant and told that they had to be ready to leave for Petrograd in an hour’s time with their family. The house was to be evacuated. Wakening the children and staff, and quickly packing suitcases for the unknown ahead, they trooped downstairs only to find that the military drivers could not get Michael’s cars started.

  Michael watched them struggling for a while, and then suggested that it would be best if they called out his chauffeur to help. Eventually they did so, and he started the cars for them, his face saying what he thought of these bungling drivers. In consequence it was not until 5.10 a.m., 70 minutes later than ordered, that the convoy set out for Petrograd.8

  From the viewpoint of their nervous guards it was just in time. The Supreme Commander General Lavr Kornilov had ordered his crack Third Cavalry Corps to advance on the capital and Michael’s ‘private army’, his beloved Savage Division, was marching on Gatchina, and was so close it would be in the woods around it within hours.

  GENERAL Kornilov had intended to strengthen the government, not rebel against it. He had replaced Brusilov in mid-July after the failure
of the ‘Kerensky Offensive’ launched on June 18, and he was determined to restore discipline in the army, including the reimposition of the death penalty. No army could wage war when regiments refused to advance or simply deserted to the rear whenever the enemy counter-attacked. The ‘Kerensky Offensive’ had shown that ‘the world’s first democratic army’ would, when tested, vote with its feet.

  Kornilov, the son of a Cossack peasant, and the man who had formally placed Alexandra under house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo in March, did not think of himself as a rebel—‘I despise the old regime’, he said9— but he wanted a strong government which could free itself of its dependency on the dictating policies of the Soviet and the Bolsheviks.

  On August 7, he ordered General Aleksandr Krymov on the Romanian Front to move his Third Cavalry Corps northwards so that it could deal with any attempted coup by the Bolsheviks in either Petrograd or Moscow. He was prepared, he told his chief-of-staff, to disperse the Soviet, hang its leaders, and finish off the Bolsheviks.10

  As they headed north there came intelligence reports that the Bolsheviks, Lenin having quietly returned, had regrouped and were planning another attempt at seizing power in the capital. On August 22 Kerensky asked Kornilov to send a cavalry corps to defend the government, but intending that this corps, when in the capital, would then come under his direct control, not Kornilov’s. It would then give him a force not only able to deal with the Bolsheviks, but with any attempt by the right to mount a counter-revolutionary attack against him. He would cover a threat from either or both.

  This ploy backfired. The Third Cavalry Corps, which included the Savage Division and two Cossack divisions, as well as artillery, was what he would be getting and not the ‘democratic’ and biddable divisions he had expected. The Third Cavalry Corps, commanded by General Krymov, the ‘political’ general who had been one of the key figures in the Guchkov conspiracy which had been intent six months earlier on capturing Nicholas in his train, was staffed by monarchist officers, and its men were immune from Soviet and Bolshevik indoctrination. Kornilov, it seemed, was sending a Trojan Horse.