The news brought panic to the Perm Bolsheviks. Only a day’s journey from Chelyabinsk, the fear was that the Czechs would move on them next. For Michael the question was how the Bolsheviks would then react, and the answer to that was that the quicker Natasha was out of the city the better. The first available train was expected in Perm on Saturday morning, May 18. She had to be on it.
On their last day together, on Friday the day before her she left, they took an afternoon stroll, and then had a quiet and gloomy dinner in the hotel before Natasha packed to go home. ‘It is very sad to be left alone again,’ wrote Michael in his diary that night.34
Next morning, miserable at parting, but little knowing that they would never see each other again, they left the hotel at 9.30 a.m. and took a cab to the station. ‘We waited for a long time for the train on the platform there because the Siberian Express was late…Natasha found a seat in a small compartment of the international carriage, sharing with another lady.’ The train left at 12.10 p.m. He stood staring down the line as the train pulled out and waited until it was out of sight. He took a cab back to the hotel, and that night he wrote in his diary that ‘it has become so sad and so empty now that Natasha has gone, everything seems different and even the rooms have changed…’35
BEFORE leaving Perm Natasha made clear that she would be going back to fight for his release from exile. If Perm was no longer a safe place to keep an ex-Tsar, then what was he doing there? He should be sent home again, or if that was out of the question, Moscow would be better than Perm. It was an argument she saw no point in making to Uritsky in Petrograd; she would go to Moscow and bang on Lenin’s desk again.
After his move to Moscow on March 10, Lenin made the Kremlin his seat of government, choosing for himself one of the buildings of the old Court of Chancellery, opposite the Arsenal, taking a five-roomed apartment on the second floor, with offices on the same floor. The Kremlin bells now played the Internationale instead of God Save the Tsar, and the double-headed Romanov eagles mounted on the gates had been stripped of their crowns, but otherwise it was the same Kremlin Natasha knew well from her childhood.
Arriving in Moscow she went directly to her parents’ apartment at 6 Vozdvizhenkan, only a few hundred yards from the Troitsky Gate and the Kremlin immediately beyond. They were both relieved and alarmed to have her home again — relieved because she had returned safely, alarmed because of her determination to challenge Lenin head-on. ‘They’ll never let you in’, was their view.
With guards blocking entry to the Troitsky Gate and on every building within the Kremlin, entry without authority or permit was impossible. The Kremlin was a fortress, and the Bolsheviks intended to keep it that way. However, ‘impossible’ was not a term which Natasha recognised. Somehow, one set of guards passed her through to the next set of guards, so confident her manner, so persuasive her claim that she had an appointment with Comrade Lenin.
Finding Natasha yet again at his desk, Lenin was no more forthcoming than he had been at the Smolny.36 It was not his decision. She left his office empty-handed, but refusing to give up she then went on to badger other members of the Bolshevik regime, among them Trotsky — who had been ‘ill-tempered and answered rudely’ when tackled by Natasha in Petrograd.37 He was no better tempered this time.
One by one the doors opened then closed after her, leaving her to return back to her parents with nothing to show for her desperate persistence.
‘She imagined that personal intercession with the Red chieftains would move them to let him go,’ commented The Times man Wilton. ‘Of course, it was an illusion excusable only in a distracted wife’.38
In the early summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks faced too many threats to think it was safe to release Michael. On the contrary, what they were going to do, without the world finding out about it, was to murder him, and murder him long before any of the other Romanovs. The last Emperor was to die first.
21. EITHER HIM OR US
ON Tuesday, May 21, as Natasha was heading into Moscow, Michael and Johnson appeared by order at 33 Petropavlovskaya–Okhanskaya, the Perm offices of the sinister Cheka. Until then they had reported only to the local militia, next door to their hotel. However, because of the growing Czech threat, the Perm Soviet decided that it could no longer be responsible for Michael’s ‘safety’; responsibility was transferred to the provincial Cheka.1
The change seems to have coincided with a resolution by the workers in nearby Motovilikha that if the Perm Soviet did not arrest Michael, they would ‘settle with him themselves’.2 The Bolsheviks at Motovilikha, some two and a half miles away, were largely employed in the huge government munitions factory there, and were noticeably more militant than those in Perm. In his diary afterwards, Michael wrote that at the Cheka offices ‘I was given a piece of paper ordering me to go there every day at 11 o’ clock (good people, tell me what this means)’.3
The switch to the Cheka seemed at first merely an irritation. Whereas at the militia office Michael had simply popped his head around the door at whatever time suited him, now the officious Cheka demanded that he present himself at precisely the stated time; they also took delivery of all letters and telegrams to him, and read them before handing them over.4 It was an unpleasant reminder of his real position.
Nevertheless Michael continued otherwise to go about the town without restriction. In the week after Natasha left Perm, he listened to a string orchestra in the City Garden, saw ‘a dreadful farce’ in his box at the Opera House, spent an evening at the Triumph Cinema, visited a waxworks exhibition, and went in search of walking boots, buying a pair of ‘simple soldiers’ lace-up boots’.5
At one of the shops in Siberia Street the manager asked him why it was, in view of his comparative freedom, that he did not escape. Michael only laughed. ‘Where would someone as tall as I am go? They would find me immediately.’6
The Cheka was not quite so sure of that. Perm was now more crowded, as thousands of people trying to make their way eastwards found themselves stranded in the town, with the railway line to Chelyabinsk cut. Among these unexpected newcomers were ‘two Americans’ who called on Michael after dinner on Saturday, May 25. Identified by Michael only as ‘Mr O’Brien’ and ‘Mr Hess’,7 they were the kind of visitors the Cheka looked upon with suspicion, as possible messengers for plotters intent on rescuing him.
Unlike his brother held in close confinement under heavy guard in Ekaterinburg, Michael was free to go anywhere in town and meet anyone. The Cheka knew where he was at 11 o’clock in the morning, but otherwise there was no watch on him, and with the town so crowded there was little they could do to check out the papers of everyone; moreover, that would have done little to help them.
Plotters would make sure they had the right papers — or least papers that looked right — and a plausible story to go with them. Mr O’Brien and Mr Hess could be anyone. They came, they went, and the Cheka was none the wiser.
Colonel Znamerovsky certainly had ideas of escape, and given the worsening position in Perm it would be odd if he had not; with good reason he feared that the ‘Motovilikha workmen might be goaded into violence’.8 The problem was not escape in itself, but making good that escape by getting out of Perm to safety.
Curious messages arrived at the Korolev Rooms in those anxious days; two survive, though their meaning is lost. The mignonette is not a flower of brilliant beauty, but its fragrance is divine, says one. The other is equally mysterious: Turkeys are yours.9
On Tuesday May 28, a week after Michael’s first visit to the Cheka, the city was declared to be ‘in a state of war’.
THE Czech threat had also heightened fears among the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg, half-way between Perm and Chelyabinsk, and therefore at even greater risk of finding itself under attack. Nicholas and Alexandra had been transferred there from Tobolsk four weeks earlier, arriving on April 30. They had been taken to the ominously-named ‘House of Special Purpose’ — formerly, until they seized it, the two-storey home of a wealthy local me
rchant, Nikolai Ipatev. Their five children, kept behind because Alexis had been ill, rejoined them three weeks later.
The house had been hidden from curious eyes by the erection of a tall wooden fence on all sides. Five rooms on the upper floor, their window-panes painted white so that no one could see in or out, were to serve as prison for the family. The lower floor became a guardroom. Other than being allowed to walk in the garden in the afternoon, the family spent their days confined to their rooms, with nothing to do except to read and sew and make up their own games to pass the slow days. It was tedious, humiliating, and with their Red Guards marching to and fro as they pleased, deliberately oppressive.
But they were not the only Romanov captives in Ekaterinburg. Alexandra’s sister Ella, aged 54, was there also, confined in a hotel along with Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich, the three grown-up sons of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who had died in 1915, and, the youngest of the group, Vladimir Paley, the 21-year-old half-brother of Grand Duke Dimitri. They were allowed no contact with Ipatev House, and Alexandra was never told that her sister was in the town.
The locally-based but powerful Ural Regional Soviet — commanding Perm as well as Ekaterinburg — had no intention of evacuating Nicholas and his family, notwithstanding the threat from the Czechs. With the railway line to Moscow blocked at Chelyabinsk, their options were limited in any event. What to do with the family would be a decision they were not ready to make.
However, at the end of May their second group of six Romanov captives were told that they were being moved ‘for safety’ to Alapaevsk, a bleak mining town some 180 miles to the north-east of Ekaterinburg, and roughly the same distance from Perm. There they would be confined in a small simply-furnished schoolhouse, with no more than five or six rooms, guarded by Latvians and local Red Guards. They were allowed to walk into the town, and talk to locals, but in the evenings there was nothing to do but sit in their rooms, and pass the time as best they could. It was a dreary existence, in which one day was indistinguishable from the next; with no prospect of escape, they could only endure the grinding monotony in the hope that somehow better times lay ahead.
Had they known of it, they would have been astonished at the freedom enjoyed by Michael — and the seeming concern of the Bolsheviks to treat him as they treated no other of their Romanov prisoners. Nights at the opera, dinner parties with friends, shopping in town, his own staff of retainers — that was a privileged world they could barely imagine still existed. On the face of it, and whatever the reason for his special treatment, Michael was a very lucky man indeed.
Sadly, that luck was about to run out.
AS Ella and the other Romanovs in her group were preparing for their move to Alapaevsk, Michael noted in his diary that ‘it is difficult to work out what is going on, but something major is brewing’.10 There were rumours everywhere as he walked about town, heads still bowed as he passed by. A few days later, on Monday June 3, he wrote to Natasha to set out his views on his own position, his spirits low.
‘My dearest sweetheart, my own darling Natasha…it is now 16 days since you went away. I can’t describe how I feel— depressed and desperate from all the surroundings here, from this dreadful town where I am in absolute uncertainty and living an aimless life. Why do I write this when you know it so well yourself!’ One practical complaint was that the Korolev Rooms were becoming increasingly expensive, and a drain on his reserves of cash. ‘The price for the rooms is going up all the time and the cook serves us with enormous bills,’ he added.
The good news was that he had found an apartment at 212 Ekaterinskaya Street with ‘a nice view from the balcony over the river’.11 That would save money, for it was privately owned by his friends the Tupitsins, and the rent would be almost nominal. It would be free in a couple of weeks, and when Natasha could get back to Perm it would be a home for them. Given the military situation he feared that ‘we will not be able to see each other for another two months, which would be dreadful’, though if matters improved, ‘I will hope that you can come here sooner’.
To this letter he added a separate postscript, jokily headlining it as The Recent Political Review and signing off as Correspondent-on-Tour.
Everything here is outwardly calm, but the authorities admit that things are rather acute and serious. We have to continue to give our signatures daily in the Committee of ‘Charms’. In the town squares the railwaymen and party-workers are receiving military training, drill and similar body exercises… The town is full of rumours and disturbed by news that in the east — not very far away, in ‘Katia’s Burg’ [Ekaterinburg] there are activists of either ‘Czech-Slovaks’ or ‘Slovak-Czechs’… What their further plans are, nobody knows, but our town is now declared under military law. 12
Shortly after sending off this letter Michael suffered another bout of his ‘damned stomach pains’, the first for some time. Next day he went as usual to report to the Cheka, and ‘had a bit of a run in with one of the “comrades” there who was very rude to me’.13 The ‘comrade’ was Gavriil Myasnikov, former chairman of the Motovilikha Soviet, who had been appointed ten days earlier to the Perm Cheka, taking over responsibility for dealing with ‘counter-revolutionaries’.14
With his arrival, the local Cheka changed from being offensively officious to menacing. Before the 1917 February Revolution Myasnikov had spent four years in a labour camp for terrorist acts. In the six years before that he had been arrested and imprisoned for various violent crimes, his life a series of escapes, periods in hiding, and prison until in 1913 he went to a labour camp.15 Now 29, Myasnikov hated what Michael represented and bitterly resented the freedom he was allowed in Perm.
Among his Bolshevik members in Motovilikha there had been fierce criticism of the benign treatment afforded Michael and the way in which the ‘bourgeoisie’ would bow to him in the street, and lay flowers in his path when he went to the Cathedral.
There had been nothing Myasnikov could do about that from Motovilikha, but now as head of a Cheka department he was determined to come down hard on Michael and show him who was master in Perm.
A fellow Bolshevik, the secretary of the Perm Party Committee, thought Myasnikov to be ‘a bloodthirsty and embittered man, and not altogether sane…’16 Other local Bolsheviks were also frightened of him, believing him capable of utter ruthlessness. In turn, he suspected some members of the Perm Soviet of being in awe of Michael and too ready to protect him. He was also convinced that there is ‘an organisation of officers attempting to liberate him’.17
There appears to have been some effort by the ‘moderates’ to remove Myasnikov from the city Cheka, for only a week after his appointment they tried to get rid of him by ‘promoting’ him to the Ural Regional Cheka in Ekaterinburg. But after he refused to go, the appointment went to the local Cheka chairman, F. N. Lukoyanov,18 whose removal left Myasnikov more powerful than before. Lukoyanov was no saint; Myasnikov was a cold-blooded killer.
Michael, of course, knew nothing of Myasnikov other than he was rude and unpleasant; after his first ‘run in’ with him at the ‘Committee of Charms’ he simply shrugged off the row and went off on the Kama in a motor boat. In the afternoon he had ‘wonderful coffee and cake’ with the landlady at the Korolev Rooms, and in the evening walked to the City Garden to listen to a string orchestra.19
What troubled him more was that over the next three days he would spend much of his days in bed, suffering from stomach pains. On Saturday, June 8, ‘I ate nothing after midday because I was in pain all the time’. On Sunday he ‘spent the whole day in bed by the window’ and in the evening Znamerovsky arrived ‘and told me much of interest about rumours circulating in the city’.20
On Monday he was on his feet all day ‘but felt very poorly’; he also had a telegram from Natasha to report that she had arrived back in Gatchina from Moscow ‘last Wednesday’ after two weeks of fruitlessly banging on doors in her efforts to have him released. She saw no hope of that now, but she would be cheered by news that
he had found an apartment. At least they would have somewhere to live together when next she could get to Perm.
The following day, Tuesday, Michael felt much better and the pains were ‘not as intense and did not last long’. Znamerovsky with Michael’s godson Nagorsky came to tea, and at 10 p.m. Nagorsky popped back to say goodbye , for as Michael wrote in his diary next morning, ‘he is going to Petrograd today.’ 21
It was Wednesday June 12. The last day of Michael’s life.
MICHAEL could not have known it, but he had been secretly ‘sentenced to death’ a few days earlier. There was no signed order and no paper trail to identify the names of those who decided his fate. In Perm itself, where the murder necessarily had to take place, there would be attempts many years later to pretend that it was entirely a local decision, taken under the pressure of the immediate threat from the Czechs and ‘Whites’ — ex-Tsarist officers and soldiers who had declared their own war on the Reds and were advancing from the east. But Perm was less at risk than Ekaterinburg or Alapaevsk, both of which were far nearer to the approaching enemy. Moreover, it would be another five weeks — July 17/18 — before the Ural Regional Soviet, which commanded all, would order the deaths of Nicholas and his family, and the other six Romanovs held in Alapaevsk. The decision to ‘execute’ Michael on June 12 was not therefore for the same reasons as the others. Moreover, officially, Michael was not to be killed at all — he was to escape.
Escape? That was its own proof that Moscow and not the mindless thugs in the Perm Cheka, or their counterparts in Ekaterinburg, were behind his murder. The local Bolsheviks were well able to kill Michael in secret; it was far beyond their wit to understand why, having done so, they should then promote afterwards the story that he had escaped — a story that could only, on the face of it, encourage the very counter-revolutionaries Michael’s death was supposed to dismay. Why kill him and then hand the enemy a propaganda victory by telling them he was alive, free, and had outwitted his captors?
The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II Page 26