Desperate to bring good news, on August 23, the German Ukraine Delegation in Kiev sent a positive cable to Berlin to say that Michael ‘is by no means as pro-Entente as he is said to be…’16 That seemed to confirm an earlier report that ‘attention should be paid to news which has repeatedly come in recently that certain differences of opinion exist between Grand Duke Michael and the Omsk government about the Entente, as the Omsk government is pursuing solely Russian objectives, and in any case wishes to avoid a war with Germany’.17
By then the Germans in Russia had added reason for winning over Michael. An Allied Expeditionary Force had been sent to Murmansk on the White Sea, and although small, it had captured Archangel on August 2, 1918. The first aim of the British and French — joined later by Americans — had been to secure the stockpile of armaments sent in to supply Russia before their peace treaty in March and so that they did not fall into the hands of either the Bolsheviks or the Germans. The second aim was to re-open the war against Germany in Russia, for which they needed the support of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s advancing White Army in eastern Russia.
That was reason enough for the Germans to hope that somehow Michael could be persuaded to switch sides, and in their eagerness to win him over the Germans saw a new opportunity to earn his favour. After all, the Kaiser had already made sure that his precious son George had passed safely into family care in Denmark. Now the bait would be Natasha. They would save his beloved wife from the Bolsheviks, and the execution squad which surely otherwise awaited her in the next few weeks. Michael would then be further in their debt and that must surely bring him to accept that imperial Germany was his friend, not his foe.
NATASHA, who was then staying with her friend Maggie Abakanovich at her house on the Moika, had been told that Michael had disappeared within hours of his being taken from the hotel. Colonel Znamerovsky had cabled her that ‘Our friend and Johnny have vanished without trace’.18 Seeking explanation she and Maggie had gone at once to the offices of Cheka boss Uritsky, who promptly arrested them both, sending them to the women’s prison on the fourth floor of his headquarters at 2 Gorokhovyana Street.19
One of the last men to see her at the house on the Moika before her arrest was the German diplomat Armin von Reyer, a key figure in the secret negotiations between the German legation and the monarchist organisations in Petrograd. The fact that von Reyer knew where she was staying says much about German interest in Natasha. Afterwards he reported their conversation to Prince Henry in Berlin, emphasising Michael’s popularity and recounting her story of the scenes at Easter when the people of Perm had overwhelmed them with flowers and gifts.20
Von Reyer was never in any doubt that Michael was alive, for there were too many reports to think otherwise. One of the first on his desk was that Michael had been ‘brought by ship to Rybinsk’, a river port on the Upper Volga, 200 miles north-east of Moscow and about 1,000 miles westwards by river from Perm. The fact that this proved wholly wrong when more credible reports placed him some 1,600 miles to the east in Omsk, and behind friendly lines, did nothing to disturb the main point — that he had escaped his captors in Perm.21
In Petrograd, the question for the Germans was how Natasha would escape her captors. Her friend Maggie had been released, since even Uritsky could not think up any charge against her, except that she was Natasha’s friend. That done, the threat for Natasha was that she would be shortly transferred to a proper prison in Moscow to stand trial for conspiracy.
German intervention was discreet, as it had to be if it was to be effective. In consequence, ten weeks later Natasha was still confined on the fourth-floor at Cheka headquarters. The reason was that she was said to be too ill to be moved to prison in Moscow; she was suffering from tuberculosis — or so claimed a doctor who examined her.22 Shortly afterwards, at the insistence of the doctor, she was removed to a nursing home, under guard. It was just in time. For on August 30 Lenin was shot and seriously wounded at a factory in Moscow by a Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya Kaplan, and coincidentally Uritsky was assassinated in Petrograd by a Jewish military cadet, Leonid Kanegisser, in revenge for the execution of a friend.
Coming as they did within hours of each other, the Kremlin reacted with ferocity, bringing in two decrees which inaugurated what would be known as the Red Terror. The first instituted the execution of hostages as reprisal for further attacks on Bolshevik leaders; the second commanded the execution of anyone ‘with links to the White Guard organisations, conspiracies, and seditious actions’.23 No one was to be spared, even those with diplomatic immunity, as was shown twenty-four hours after Uritsky’s death when a Cheka squad forced its way into the British consulate in Petrograd and killed the resisting naval attaché Captain Cromie, shot down at the top of the staircase. His body was hung out of the window and left there for days.24
Hundreds of others would be killed in the coming weeks and months, and their number would doubtless have included Natasha; in the event, as a furious Cheka discovered a week later, she had vanished into the night. The guard at the nursing home knew she was in her bed when the lights were switched off, but in the morning she was no longer there.
The first her daughter Tata would know about that was when Gatchina Cheka chief Serov arrived at Nikolaevskaya Street on Saturday, September 7, 1918, and arrested her.25 Kept overnight in the local Cheka office she was bundled onto a train next day and taken under escort to the same prison room which had been home to her mother since her arrest on June 13.
Told by Serov that she would be sent to a correction camp for young criminals, ‘I burst into tears’.26 The threat turned out to be a bluff. After interrogation it became clear that she was as much in the dark as the Cheka; she spent another frightened night sleeping on a tabletop, before being told that she was free.
It was pouring with rain that Tuesday morning, September 10, and she was drenched within minutes of getting outside. She had no money and had not eaten for two days. Knowing that she could not go back to Gatchina, she took her small suitcase and struggled with it on the long walk to the Fontanka, hoping to find refuge at the apartment of her ‘Uncle Alyosha’, Matveev. Climbing the stairs she reached his door only to discover that he was no longer there. The housekeeper refused to let her in, complaining that she had not been paid, and that she was tired of having the Cheka turn up every day in their hunt for Natasha. With that the door was slammed in her face.
She sat down on her suitcase on the landing and started to cry. Suddenly she heard a door open on the floor above and footsteps on the stairs. A voice called her name, and when she looked up, startled, it was to see ‘a completely strange woman with flaming red hair’. It was Princess Vyazemskaya, disguised under a wig. Moments later Tata was running upstairs and into the arms of her mother. The apartment was her hiding place from the Cheka searching the floor below. It had been rented by the Germans.27
IN Perm, armed with the Red Terror decrees, Cheka chairman Malkov decided to combine those with an announcement that Michael and Johnson had been recaptured, thereby putting an end to the policy that he was leading a White army in Siberia. Since he would not have dared to do that without higher authority, it would appear that in the Urals at least there was increasing disquiet about propaganda which seemed to serve only the interests of the Whites. To dispose of Michael, Malkov issued a statement on September 18 that six days earlier a Cheka agent had arrested two men who, walking along a road, were ‘behaving in a suspicious manner’.
One of these suspects, ‘a tall man with a light-brown beard particularly drew attention to himself’. Taken to Cheka headquarters it was noted that the men were ‘wearing make-up’; when this was removed ‘they were identified as the former Grand Duke Michael Romanov and his secretary Johnson’ and were immediately ‘detained under close guard’.28 To add substance to all of this, valet Chelyshev was passed off as Michael, and chauffeur Borunov as Johnson.
Two days later the Russian Telegraph Agency reported that ‘Michael Romanov and his secreta
ry have been detained by agents of Perm Provincial Cheka. They have been taken to Perm.’29 The following day, under Warrant No. 3694, Chelyshev and Borunov were marched from their cells, and shot dead.30
A month earlier, Sverdlov, the ‘Red Tsar’, had cabled Perm to say that ‘as to the Romanov servants, I give you permission to act as you see fit’, which did not mean that Perm could use them to ‘kill off’ Michael. A furious Kremlin ordered a flustered Malkov to withdraw the story immediately. In consequence the announcement of Michael’s ‘recapture’ appeared in only one newspaper and that was then blacked-out by being covered in printer’s ink; in the regional newspapers the announcement was removed at the last moment from the presses.31
No further mention of this story appeared anywhere, and in consequence no attention was paid to it. The German report to Berlin which made reference to it dismissed it cynically as ‘same as always’.32 Michael was still in play, and the Germans were still intent on bringing him over to their side.
Nonetheless that would not save his ‘accomplices’ in Perm. After the killing of Chelyshev and Borunov, Colonel Znamerovsky and his wife were taken from the same prison and with others led to a sewage farm outside Perm, lined up, and shot.33 Had Natasha remained in Perm instead of going off to Moscow as she did, there can be little doubt that she would also have been standing in that sewage farm alongside the others. Indeed, had she not escaped from her Cheka prison in Petrograd, she would have been in another line-up at some point, with the same result. She would have been murdered.
As it was, the Germans were in the process of passing her off as someone else, and more successfully than Perm had managed in the case of the unfortunate Chelyshev and Borunov. Natasha was to re-emerge as Frau Tania Klenow, with passport number 4594, issued by the Ukrainian consulate-general in Petrograd, and with a photograph showing her wearing the white head-dress of a nursing nun.34 The outfit had been smuggled into her hideaway apartment on the Fontanka; with the photo in her passport, dated October 1, some three weeks after her escape, the Germans were ready for their next move: her removal to safety behind their lines.
Tata had already gone. After her reunion with her mother on September 10, she had been told to go back to Gatchina immediately in order not to arouse suspicion and to wait there until she received further instructions. They were not long in coming.
Tata would later remember that a ‘strange man arrived…who he was I have never discovered, he vanished as silently as he appeared, leaving my passport; the tickets he would hand to me at the station next day’.35 The passport was also forged, though under her real name of Nathalie Mamontov, it being thought safe enough since it was unlikely to be connected to the Brasova name of her mother in any routine checks at railway stations or at the border crossing into the Ukraine. The Germans had also arranged that she would travel with one of Natasha’s friends, a Madame Yakhontova, who had property in the Ukraine and was travelling on a genuine passport.
So that Cheka eyes would have no reason to pay her more than a passing glance, Tata set off next morning with nothing to show that she would be gone for more than the day. The ‘strange man’ had taken away her suitcase the day before saying she would get it back, packed, along with her tickets when she got to Petrograd station.
He was there waiting for her, together with Madame Yakhontova, when she arrived and he had reserved seats for both of them in the train crowded with people trying to get out of Russia. Her suitcase was already on the rack above her seat, along with other cases belonging to her mother; there was also a kitbag filled with dirty clothes, under which were Natasha’s sables as well as other valuables. The stranger thrust money into Tata’s hands, waved goodbye, and disappeared back into the station.36
The route southwards out of Bolshevik Russia was through Vitebsk to the border crossing at Orsha on the Dnieper, a distance of some 420 miles.
At Orsha the next morning there was a long wait for examination of exit permits and luggage. It was a worrying prospect, given the valuables — including Natasha’s pearl ear-rings ‘the size of hazel nuts’ — secreted inside a bar of soap hidden in their suitcases.37 Madame Yakhontova found a man who assured her that the Bolshevik guards checking the luggage could be bribed; fortunately the man proved a genuine ‘fixer’ and to their relief the guards passed their luggage through with only casual scrutiny.
Across the border, Tata was ‘struck by the look of order and tidiness that pervaded the territory occupied by the Germans…It was in such marked contrast to Bolshevik Russia…’ There was also ample food to buy, and they purchased bread, butter, cold meat, cream cheese and bottles of kvas, a local beer. Across the border they boarded a new train which took them through the old Stavka town of Mogilev, then to Gomel and on to Kiev, a journey of 300 miles. At stations en route the locals on the platforms would offer for sale apples, pears, plums and watermelons. After Bolshevik Russia ‘it seemed a land of plenty’.38
On arrival in Kiev they were met by Princess Vyazemskaya, who had left Petrograd the previous day with another German-forged passport; she had arranged accommodation for them with friends, and there they settled down to wait for Natasha. At last, in early October, there came a telegram from Gomel, the half-way point from the border crossing. Natasha would be with them in a few hours.
It did not take the Bolsheviks very long to work out that nurse ‘Frau Klenow’ in the white head-dress and the Countess Brasova were one and the same person, not only because once across the border she took off the head-dress but because of the fuss made of her by the Germans as she did so. The demure and humble nun crossing the border was no more; flanked by saluting Germans, with bowing flunkeys to carry her luggage into a reserved first-class carriage, it would be characteristic of her if Natasha had then given a mocking wave to the watching Cheka men on the other side of the line.
Certainly, the Russian Telegraph Agency realised who she was for it reported her crossing, saying that ‘Brasova was greeted with great honour by the German local authorities…She was presented with an officer’s carriage for her journey to Kiev’.39 Reading that must have been a bitter moment in Gorokhovaya Street.
By then the Germans in Kiev were busy on the next part of their plan to make Michael even more grateful to them for their help: to send Natasha through Germany to be reunited with her eight-year-old son George in Denmark and bring him back. On October 21 the anxious message to Berlin was that ‘as we are losing considerable ground with the monarchists…permitting the journey might be a suitable way to place the monarchic circles under an obligation to us. The precondition, though, would be that a political influencing of the Copenhagen court by the countess to our disadvantage is not to be feared.’40 Natasha was not to be rude about the Germans.
King Christian X of Denmark was happy to extend an invitation to Natasha, though he raised his eyebrows when a subsequent request came into Copenhagen for permission to bring her daughter, Princess Vyazemskaya and two other companions. He agreed but later ‘he did comment to the minister that he had not expected that she would appear with so many companions’.41 Berlin signalled its approval for the journey on October 30, the quid pro quo being that she would bring little George back with her to the Ukraine, as bait for Michael. With a grateful Michael, something might yet be salvaged in Russia if the monarchists rallied to the Germans. It was a desperate last card, but what could they lose by trying?
Natasha, now Grafin von Brassow, posed once more for a passport photograph, this time wearing a hat and an elegant dress and completed the details for the exit visa. The young clerk typing out the paperwork looked up and asked her date of birth. Natasha told him it was June 27, 1888, and he duly filled in her age as thirty; her world might be falling apart, but Natasha was never going to admit that she was thirty-eight.42 With the papers in her hand, bags packed, farewells made, and money organised, Natasha and the others gathered excitedly as they prepared to leave. Unfortunately, the date was November 11, 1918 and at eleven o’clock that morning the w
ar ended. Natasha was holding a passport to nowhere.
WITH the war over, it was now the turn of the British to rescue Natasha. With German authority at an end it could only be a question of time before the Bolsheviks took control of Kiev and caught up with her. Knowing that, she and Tata together with her friend Princess Vyazemskaya fled to Odessa hoping to find some way to escape by sea. They found a room which they all shared at the Hotel de Londres, dreading the future. There was widespread looting and there were rumours that the only apparent exit route to safety, through Romania, had been closed.
As Odessa became blocked landward, and the sound of artillery fire could be heard in the distance, there came sudden and unexpected deliverance. A French battleship arrived and, after its marines and sailors stormed ashore, order was swiftly restored. However, the French showed no interest in evacuating anyone.
Then a British destroyer, HMS Nereide appeared in the harbour. Seeing it, Tata recalled, ‘our hearts stood still’.43 She ran up the gangway and asked permission to come aboard. Minutes later all three were being invited into the wardroom for tea with its captain, Lieutenant-Commander Herbert Wyld. HMS Nereide, just 772 tons, had a crew of only 72 including six officers. But having heard Natasha’s story, ‘they took us under their wing’, as Tata put it. ‘They came en masse for tea at our hotel, and we in turn were invited to meals on board.’44 And when the time came for the destroyer to leave, the captain told them, to their immense joy, that they would not be left behind — that despite the cramped quarters they would be evacuated aboard the ship, on the first leg of a journey which would take them to Britain.
The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II Page 29