At the beginning of 1918 Natasha had thought, as Michael had done as he toasted the New Year, that the year ahead might bring an end to their torment. Now, on the deck of a British destroyer, as Odessa faded into the distance, she found herself facing the coming new year as a refugee, fleeing prison or worse, and with a husband who had been missing for more than six months. Yet hope was not lost. Natasha still believed that Michael was alive and that somehow soon they would be reunited.
As Michael had said in the last letter he had written to her from his desk in the Korolev Rooms, and which she would clutch to her for the rest of her life, ‘My dear soul… I will hope that God will allow us to be together again….’
24. A FAMILY DIVIDED
THE massacre of Nicholas and his family at Ekaterinburg and the following day’s massacre at Alapaevsk had been easily uncovered for the Whites had captured both towns relatively soon afterwards. Although they did not find the bodies of Nicholas and family, the bullet-marked walls and bloodstained scene in the basement of the Ipatev House told its own story, if not yet the whole story; at Alapaevsk they uncovered the mineshaft and removed the six bodies buried there. Interrogation of prisoners provided the evidence of what had happened and that in turn served to confirm that the Bolsheviks had also killed everyone in Ekaterinburg.
However, when the Whites reached Perm in December 1918 they found nothing which could solve the mystery of Michael. The Cheka men had fled, and the immediate witnesses to the abduction from the hotel room — Chelyshev and Borunov — were dead. There was no blood, no body, and no trace of where he had been taken, though there was no doubt that he had been forcibly abducted from the hotel by five men and taken away with Johnson in two carriages, for that much they could gather from servants at the Korolev Rooms. After what they had seen in the Ipatev House and the mineshaft, the presumption had to be that he was dead, though they could not be certain of that without finding his body, and as to that they had no idea where even to begin their search.
The Bolshevik story had never changed — that he had escaped — so could they have hidden him somewhere as hostage? The Bolsheviks had taken four senior Grand Dukes as hostages and they were being held in a fortress on an island in the Neva some miles upstream from Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had thought that the four — Grand Dukes Paul, Dimitri Konstantinovich, Bimbo and his brother George — might be useful pawns at some point; any idea of that vanished on January 15, 1919, when the two leading German ‘comrades’, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered after they attempted their own revolution in Berlin. In revenge for that, or such was the excuse, the four Grand Dukes were taken from their cells, shipped downriver to the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, and on January 19 lined up against a wall and shot, their bodies thrown into a mass grave.
That brought the number of Romanovs known to have been murdered by the Bolsheviks to seventeen in the past six months. Michael would make it eighteen, but who was going to announce that without a body, and without a confession?
Nine months later, in September 1919, after a desperate letter from Natasha in London, Admiral Kolchak, signing himself as Supreme Commander of the White Army, replied that all information I possess does not give any indication that the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich is at present in Siberia or the Far East His destiny is quite unknown after he was taken away… and all attempts to find out where he is have not produced any results.1
In short, Michael was to be ‘presumed dead’ but the Admiral chose not to say that directly. He was trying to be kind.
NATASHA’S journey back to Britain with Tata had taken many weeks. The Nereide took her down the Black Sea only as far as Constantinople where later she was given passage in a British battleship, Agamemnon, to Malta; from there she went by merchant ship to Marseilles; by rail to Paris, and finally on to London.
It was not therefore until March 1919 that she reached Wadhurst, in Sussex, and the large comfortable Tudor house, ‘Snape’, which with Paddockhurst no longer available had been leased in Michael’s name in 1917 in expectation of his return at war’s end. Michael had then transferred enough cash to secure it for two years, so at least Natasha had somewhere to go. Johnson’s mother had gone there from Paddockhurst; like Natasha, she was desperate for news. Her son was also missing. Where Michael was, he must be. The arrival of Natasha raised her hopes that somehow all might yet be well.
Natasha still believed she would see Michael again. In Paris there had been the exciting news that the French Colonial Office had received a ‘top secret’ report that Michael was in French Indo-China, and asking for a visa. The French wanted photographs for identification. Bitterly, the man turned out to be a fraud2. There were other false alarms. Michael was in Japan. Michael was in Siam. Each time, desperate hope was followed by despair.3
It was torture — and in all this, one comfort was that little George had been brought back by Miss Neame from Copenhagen, and that after a year of separation she at last had her two children safely back in her arms. ‘Where is Papa?’ George had asked plaintively in a letter he had written in August 1918 on his eighth birthday;4 it was still his question now, and there was still no answer.
The only moment of joy for Natasha was when Grand Duke Dimitri walked back into her life. Wearing British uniform he had been brought to Britain from Persia by the British ambassador there, Sir Charles Marling, in defiance of the rule that no male Romanov was to be allowed into the country. The ambassador would be rapped over the knuckles for that, but that was as far as it went. Dimitri would be the sole exception; the other surviving Grand Dukes would make France their home, for the door remained shut in Britain.
Dimitri would be a constant visitor for the first weeks and they teased each other as before. Thirty months had passed since their last meeting at Gatchina in October 1916, expecting that they would then meet again at Brasovo for Christmas, not as now in England — Dimitri penniless, his father Paul executed that January by a firing squad, Natasha not knowing whether she was wife or widow. But although he was as flattering as ever, Natasha was so tormented by her fears for Michael that she could hardly talk about anything else. By the summer he had drifted away, trying to pick up the pieces of his own life.5 As a sign of just how much the world had changed, on July 26, 1919, Natasha travelled up to London to Marlborough House to meet the Dowager Empress Marie. The British had sent a battleship to Odessa to rescue the Dowager Empress, her daughter Xenia and a swollen entourage of fellow refugees who had sheltered with her in the Crimea under German protection. Arriving in London she had gone to stay with her sister, the Dowager Queen Alexandra. The meeting was the first since she had given Natasha a dressing-down there six years earlier in 1913.
Nervous at the prospect, Natasha took Mme Johnson along with her as moral support, as well as little George, the grandson the Dowager Empress had never seen in Russia, nor had wanted to know about. Now the Dowager Empress made a great fuss of George; her beloved Michael’s only son, and with looks that reminded her of his father at that age.6
As for Michael, she brushed aside Natasha’s fears for him, adamant that he was alive and well; indeed she went much further than that: she refused to believe that anyone in her immediate family had been killed by the Bolsheviks. She would persist in so saying until her own death nine years later in Copenhagen. Natasha came away heartened, but vaguely disturbed. Everyone knew that Nicholas had been killed, except it seemed his mother. What value, then, her confidence that Michael was alive?
As the months went on, other worries crowded in. There had been some cash left in the Paris bank account set up when they left Russia in 1912, and £3,000 was transferred from Michael’s Danish account to her London bank,7 but her main asset was the jewellery she had smuggled out of Russia. Piece by piece she sold them to meet her bills, school fees for George and Tata, and her rental costs as she moved from Snape in 1920, firstly to a country house near Richmond, Surrey, and then to a smart apartment in West London. Natasha was beginning to worr
y about making ends meet.
There was nothing surprising in that. Europe was awash with poverty-stricken royals — Germans, Austrians, Greeks as well as Russians and others. The collapse of old Europe brought devastation in its wake as crowns were kicked into the gutter with no one to pick them up again. The Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin shot himself; so did the Kaiser’s desolate youngest son Joachim. A British gunboat sent up the Danube rescued the ex-Austrian emperor Karl from mob revenge in Hungary, though he died shortly after being sent with his wife and eight children into exile in Portuguese Madeira, arriving with just £320 in his pocket. A British cruiser snatched Prince Andrew of Greece from a firing squad in Athens, after he was court-martialled as scapegoat for the humiliating defeat suffered by Greece in its war with Turkey; unwelcome in Britain, in 1944 he would die penniless in Monaco — and thus never to know that four years later his only son Philip would marry the future Queen of England.
In London, Dimitri’s sister Marie was reduced to knitting sweaters for a living. When in desperation she wrote to Queen Mary for help, she received in reply a letter which did not contain the hoped-for cheque, but merely a list of people the Queen suggested might buy her sweaters.
Dimitri gave up on London as too expensive and went to Paris where he ended up in the arms of Coco Chanel, the famed perfumier. She kept him in style in the Ritz, though by chance he amply repaid her: testing out six new perfumes, she asked him to tell her which he liked most; he sniffed all six then pronounced the fifth to be the best. Chanel No 5 would prove to be one of the most successful brands of all time. Fortunately for Dimitri, he went on in 1924 to marry an American heiress, Audrey Emery of Cincinnati; their son — born in London and thereafter known as Paul Ilyinski, would become a US marine, and end up as Republican mayor of Palm Beach, Florida.
Otherwise, the reality for those who had lost everything was that empty titles were matched by empty pockets. It also concentrated minds. Natasha’s financial problems would go on, but inevitably there came a time when she had to face the fact that Michael was dead. Coming to terms with that was also a practical necessity: Michael’s assets had to be recovered and his affairs sorted out while they still could be. To achieve that he had to be declared dead by a court, and six years after he had disappeared without trace, that was what happened. On July 5, 1924, the High Court in London granted her letters of administration of the English estates of the late Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich of Russia who ‘died on or since the 12 day of June 1918, at a place unknown, intestate’.8 The value of Michael’s assets in England were given as only £95, but it was the order not the money which mattered.
Michael was legally dead. And nowhere was the news received more gladly than in a little fishing village across the Channel. For here at last was the opportunity Grand Duke Kirill had so long been waiting for, to take what he had not dared to take before. He would now become the next Emperor.
IN June 1917 Kirill had been given permission by Kerensky to go to Finland; he remained there with his family until 1920, when they all left for Germany. Later he and his German-born wife Ducky and their three children made their home in St Briac, on the Brittany coast. It was here on August 8, one month after the London High Court order, that Kirill tested the waters by issuing his first manifesto, declaring himself ‘Guardian of the Throne’9 — a title which confused everyone but which emboldened him a month later to issue a second manifesto in which he proclaimed himself ‘Emperor of All the Russias’, and thus as successor to the now legally-dead Michael.10
In this manifesto he stated that ‘the Russian laws of succession…do not permit the Imperial Throne to remain vacant after the death of the previous Emperor and His nearest Heir have been established’.11
This was its own confirmation of the fact that he accepted that Michael had been Emperor; that he had not abdicated as had been claimed in March 1917, and that indeed he was still Emperor until pronounced dead in London in July. If ‘the throne is never vacant’, then the only person who had been filling it until then was Michael. Nicholas and Alexis were known to have been killed in 1918, so ‘the previous Emperor and nearest Heir’ did not refer to them. Accordingly Kirill, calling himself ‘the senior member of the Tsarist House, and sole legal heir’, was declaring himself Michael’s successor in obedience to the Fundamental Laws governing the imperial house.12
No one was likely to say so, or even consider it, but the strategy of the Bolsheviks in denying the monarchists a ‘live banner’ by pretending that Michael was alive, not dead, now appeared to be vindicated six years later. That apart, the manifesto split the Romanov family, as it still divides them today.
Of the sixteen Grand Dukes who had been alive at the start of the war, only six lived long enough to get out of Russia. Of these, three — Kirill’s two brothers, Boris and Andrew unsurprisingly recognised him as Tsar, as did Michael’s brother-in-law Sandro. The three others — the 68-year-old former army supreme commander Nikolasha, his younger brother Peter, and Dimitri, did not. It also divided the huge numbers of monarchists then living in exile, in France, Britain, Germany, the Balkans and the United States, after the Red Army finally crushed the Whites in 1922 to become masters of all Russia.
The Dowager Empress was scathing in her condemnation. She protested to Nikolasha from her home in Denmark:
I was most terribly pained when I read Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich’s manifesto proclaiming himself EMPEROR OF ALL THE RUSSIAS. To date there has been no precise information concerning the fate of My beloved Sons or My Grandson and, for this reason, I consider the proclamation of a new EMPEROR to be premature. There is still no one who could ever extinguish in me the last ray of hope.
I fear that this manifesto will create division. This will not improve the situation but, quite the opposite, will worsen it, while Russia is tormented enough without such a thing.
If it has pleased THE LORD GOD, as he acts in HIS mysterious ways, to summon My beloved sons and grandson to HIMSELF, then, without wishing to look ahead, and with firm hope in the mercy of GOD, I believe that HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR will be elected in accordance with Our Basic Laws by the Orthodox Church in concert with the Russian People… I am sure that, as the senior member of the HOUSE OF THE ROMANOVS, You are of the same opinion as Myself.
MARIA.13
Kirill had expected bitter opposition. He told Michael’s sister Xenia that ‘I know full well that I can expect no mercy from all the malicious attacks and accusations of vanity’.14 The attacks on him were, however, founded on more than malice and charges of self-aggrandisement. The greatest practical objection to Kirill’s action was that the ‘White Russians’ were united only in their opposition to the Bolsheviks and in their belief that their enemy would not rule for long, and come that day they would all return home.
Even among those who favoured a return to the crown, many wanted that to be a decision settled by a constituent assembly — in short, on the same terms as those set out in Michael’s manifesto of March 1917. A constitutional monarchy might follow the downfall of the Bolshevik regime, and monarchists naturally hoped that it would, but the critical need was to overthrow the Bolsheviks, not divide the opposition.
Nikolasha, still widely respected as the former Supreme Commander, gave voice to that view when he issued his own manifesto in the wake of Kirill’s. The aim, he said, was to re-establish the rule of law in Russia without stipulating the form of government15 — in effect, another restatement of Michael’s manifesto. Kirill had jumped the gun. In any case, why Kirill as Emperor? The so-called Supreme Monarchist Council, which claimed to represent majority monarchist opinion, favoured Dimitri16 — and as it happened, so did the British government. Clinging to the small print of imperial laws, the high-minded Council held that Kirill — and his two younger brothers — were excluded from the succession because their German-born mother had not converted to Orthodoxy at the time of her marriage, as required by law.17 It did not help that Kirill had married not only a divorcée but,
contrary to the law of the Russian Orthodox Church, his first cousin.
Moreover there was also the abiding memory for many monarchists of the red flag on the tower of his palace in Petrograd in March 1917 and his arrival at the Tauride Palace wearing a red bow as he marched his marines to pledge their support to the Duma, in breach of his oath of allegiance. Kirill would never admit fault then, nor fault now as he named himself Emperor, and wife ‘Ducky’ as the Empress. He also promoted his son Vladimir from prince to ‘Grand Duke’ and ‘Tsarevich’18— a move which would further cement the divisions in the Romanov family.
To be a Grand Duke under the imperial law meant that you were the son or grandson of a Tsar; Vladimir was a great-grandson of Alexander II and as such was entitled to be styled only as a prince. As for making him the Tsarevich and next-in-line to the throne — for many the door was then not only shut but slammed in his face. It has never been opened since. The division among the Romanovs which followed Kirill’s grasp for the crown persists to this day, with his grand-daughter Marie’s claim to be ‘Head of the House of Romanov’ mocked by most.
Kirill attempted to buy his place in the sun by handing out titles to those who did support him. At the same time, in hoping to placate Natasha he promoted her from ‘Countess’ — a title she had given herself since Nicholas would never have done so — to that of Princess Brasova. He also promoted son George from Count, the title which Nicholas had reluctantly conceded under pressure from Michael, to Prince Brasov.19 Natasha simply shrugged. It was all now meaningless anyway, but so be it. She would call herself Princess, if only because of the satisfaction it gave her to have the Romanovs bidding for her favour.
The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II Page 30