The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (12 page)

But nothing that Michael said made any difference. Nicholas listened to him, thanked him, but then went back to his desk and to his orders piling up on his desk from his wife.

The day after the ministers left, Michael left also, knowing that there was nothing more he could say that would be of any use. Afterwards, Alexandra, blind to anything but her own conviction, wrote to Nicholas to say that ‘you must miss Misha now — how nice that you had him staying with you — I am sure that it must have done him good in every sense.’
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She was to be disappointed. Seeing things through his brother’s eyes had done Michael no good whatsoever.

MICHAEL, kept out of the frontline as he recovered from diphtheria, had settled very happily back into the domestic routine of Gatchina. Although his assets were still frozen, he had managed to extract enough money from his reluctant administrators to have the house at 24 Nikolaevskaya Street, renovated and improved. It was no longer the tumbledown it had been, with a rickety fence which the local police had complained about as a danger to passers-by. The courtyard had been covered with gravel, the summerhouse painted white, the garden filled with flowers, and a new tennis court built at the rear. Michael loved it and wanted nothing more.

He had, by imperial standards, only a handful of servants, some of whom lived in the house, and others with quarters in the one next door. They included his valet and chauffeur, Natasha’s long-serving personal maid Ayuna, a cook, the maids who cleaned and helped in the kitchen, and a washerwoman living above the washhouse in the back courtyard. There was also a new English governess, the redoubtable Margaret Neame — her predecessor, hired at Knebworth, having gone home. There were also two ADCs and an adjutant on his military staff, though they lived elsewhere in the town, as did his secretary Nikolai Johnson, who had taken an apartment on Baggout Street, near the Warsaw railway station, and close to the apartment where Natasha had lived with Wulfert.

But his household had no butler to wait at table, or liveried servants in attendance at formal dinner parties, and in that respect he did not live as grandly as at Knebworth, or could have done at Gatchina palace, where an army of retainers continued to preserve state rooms which in the main only they walked through. Michael made full use of the park, and he took advantage of the gymnasium sited in one of the quadrangles adjoining the main palace, but otherwise he was not seen there at all.

He took no precautions for his personal safety. There were no guards and apart from the low wooden picket fence, the house lay open to the front. When Michael returned home he simply parked his car on the short drive to the side of his house, walked through his front door and stepped into the living room — like every other owner of the villas and his neighbours in that suburban road.

In town, he was a familiar figure in the street and shops; he took his family to the palace church on Sundays. He spoke to the townspeople as freely as they would speak to each other, and regularly attended social gatherings and other like activities of a small community. Evening after evening was spent in committee work on various charities, and when he was convalescing stepdaughter Tata would ‘often remember him coming in dead tired’ after an exhausting round of lengthy meetings.
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He was a keen handyman, and when he got up in the morning he would often go first into the garden, to his workshop, and there ‘with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, he would plane, chisel and saw. He loved working on a lathe’.
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In the evenings his favourite pastime was music, and often he noted in his diary that he had ‘played the guitar’, sometimes with his aide and fellow enthusiast Prince Vyazemsky, or with Johnson as accompanist on the piano.

One official posted to the garrison was ‘astonished by the Grand Duke’s approachability and simplicity’. He first encountered him when he went one evening to the local cinema — ‘a filthy hovel…a stuffy shed’, crowded with ordinary soldiers and townspeople. In the semi-darkness he asked one of the audience if the place in front of him was free; the man said it was. As the official settled down, he realised that the man behind him seemed to be in the uniform of a general. Astonished, he whispered to his neighbour, asking the general’s name. The man glanced round. ‘What, behind us? Why that’s Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich’, was the reply.
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Unusually good-natured, he surprised everyone when he lost his temper. On one occasion, his neighbours were startled to hear him yelling from his windows, and then to see him leaping into the roadway, half-shaved and still in his nightshirt, wielding a whip and bellowing as he broke up a dog fight in front of his house. ‘There were blows and curses…in his temper he was quite oblivious to his appearance or dignity.’
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In the best sense of the term, Michael was a simple man; sometimes he was too trusting of others. When beggars approached in the street, he would give them money; when asked to provide job references, ‘he never refused’. Inevitably his open trust was abused, as when he recommended a man who had been sacked three times for bad conduct.
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His own shrugging answer to that kind of thing was to say that ‘it was impossible to live if one could not trust anybody’.
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Other than on official business, Michael went to ‘detestable’ Petrograd primarily for the theatre, ballet or a concert. In the last three months of 1915, he visited the capital six times,
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but never to parties there, or to mingle with the bankers, diplomats, politicians, and businessmen who thronged Petrograd; he kept himself within a small circle of close friends. Natasha would go there regularly, for lunch and shopping, but invariably she went on her own.

In the year since her return, Natasha had established an ever-widening circle of friends as she had never been able to do when she had arrived there in 1911 as mistress. Marriage, and having a husband who was a war hero, opened doors that had never opened before. And, to the fury of Tsarskoe Selo, her circle now included three young Grand Dukes who had become regulars at her home in Gatchina. One was Dimitri, eleven years her junior, who had fallen in love with her at first sight in exactly the same way as had Michael. He had seen her on the platform at Baranovichi as she was returning from Lvov in December 1914, and he was returning from
Stavka,
where he now served as a staff officer. Despite his own gallantry award won in the first weeks of the war, Dimitri was cursed with tuberculosis, and was never allowed a battlefield posting again.

Next day, having found out that she was his cousin’s wife, and discovering that she lunched regularly in the Astoria Winter Garden, he turned up there, and introduced himself.
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After that he became a regular visitor to Gatchina. A surprising new friend? In March 1915 the handsome Dimitri had followed her to Moscow, knocked on the door of her suite at the National Hotel, and then confessed that he was in love with her.
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It was very flattering to have a second Grand Duke in love with her — more than flattering, extraordinary — but also very awkward. She had come to be very fond of Dimitri, he 24 and she 35, but there could only be one man in her life, and that was, and always would be ever after, Michael. In accepting that, Dimitri told her that he ‘had decided to run away from me’, she wrote to Michael.
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Nonetheless, he kept in touch, writing to her regularly as ‘your devoted friend’ and coming to the Gatchina house frequently, though without saying anything again that might embarrass her.

Grand Duke Boris had also become a member of what a bitter Alexandra called her ‘bad set’. Meeting her for the first time when he came to Sunday lunch with his brother Andrew — an established friend of Natasha — in August 1915, he told Michael she was
charmante
.
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With three Grand Dukes driving out to Gatchina, and with Dimitri’s sister Grand Duchess Marie also becoming a regular guest, it was beginning to look as if Gatchina was becoming a rival court. Certainly that is how it appeared to the resentful eyes at Tsarskoe Selo.

Petrograd society was also left in no doubt that Madame Brasova, as she still was, seemed to be rising high. On October 18, 1915, it would have its first sight of Michael and Natasha together in public when they went to a ballet at the imperial Maryinski. The last time Natasha had been there, three years earlier, was when she had been humiliated by a Blue Cuirassier officer, shouting at her for having ‘compromised the Grand Duke’; another officer who had dared to go into her box in 1911 had been thrown out of the regiment in disgrace. Now she would have sweet revenge.

The chandelier-lit Maryinski, packed with uniformed officers, men in white tie and tails, and bejewelled ladies, had seen Michael and Boris go into the ornate imperial family box at the rear of the theatre, and Natasha, barred from sitting there, go into a nearby box. But at the interval, the imperial box emptied, and moments later the two Grand Dukes were in her box on the first tier, sipping champagne, and making clear to all those staring up at them that wherever Natasha sat was where they preferred to be. A month later, she was back and the same thing happened, except that Andrew was there also, so that there were now three Grand Dukes joining her in the interval in row 11 of her first tier box.
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But Natasha’s circle had widened far beyond Petrograd society. At her regular table in the Astoria Winter Garden, she was often to be seen lunching there with Duma deputies. The gossipy French ambassador had already heard enough in his round of the salons and at his own table to know that ‘she has been parading very strong liberal opinions for some time. Her circle is frequently open to deputies of the Left. In court quarters she has already been accused of betraying Tsarism — a fact which pleases her enormously, as it makes her views notorious and lays the foundations of her popularity. She becomes more independent every day and says the most audacious things — things which in the mouth of any other would mean twenty years in Siberia!’
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In so saying, Paléologue was reflecting the prejudiced views of the dinner tables he frequented, and one persistent source of his intelligence was Princess Paley, who also denigrated Michael no less than she did Natasha. Paléologue had never met either, and never would, so when he said of Michael that he ‘had fought bravely’ he also dismissed him as ‘the feeblest of men’,
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a description almost certainly borrowed from Princess Paley since she would so describe Michael herself. In her cultivation of salon hostesses, she saw her role as promoting the views of her patroness Alexandra, who took no part in the Petrograd social round, and Michael and Natasha were therefore constant targets for her sniping tongue. It won her plaudits in Tsarskoe Selo, and served to confirm her absolute loyalty to the court.

Dimitri Abrikosov, who as a young man in Moscow had been an early admirer of Natasha, and was now in the diplomatic service in Petrograd, became one of her regular lunch guests at Gatchina, and was at the table there one Sunday, with Grand Dukes Boris and Andrew, when the discussion turned to the defeats suffered by the Russian armies and the scandal over the shortage of munitions. Natasha suddenly exploded. ‘It was you Romanovs who brought Russia to such a state!’ The room hushed ‘and the Grand Dukes looked down at their plates’. Afterwards Abrikosov took Natasha aside and told her that ‘it was no wonder she was regarded at court as a revolutionist’.
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She was anything but, and while she had become friends with a number of Duma deputies they were by no means ‘deputies of the left’. Her first Duma friend and regular lunch companion was Count Kapnist, a monarchist albeit one who like most wanted constitutional government, not autocracy — a view which Natasha strongly supported, however distorted that view became when embellished for the benefit of Tsarskoe Selo. But not everything said about her was gossip.

One of the most remarkable statements with which the names of Michael and Natasha were linked politically came at a conference of the majority Progressive Bloc on October 25, 1915, when relations between crown and Duma were at rock bottom. The conference, with the Duma suspended by Nicholas, was in effect the Duma by another name.

The first speaker, a non-party liberal, M. M. Fedorov, was quoted as saying: ‘Grand Duke Michael has been told about the situation by a person close to his wife. He has spoken to the Tsar, and says that the Tsarita, Goremykin, and Rasputin are prepared to go as far as closing the Duma.’ That was true: Alexandra did not want it suspended, as it was; she wanted it to be shut down permanently, never to be heard of again.

Fedorov then went on to say: ‘To the question of whether or not he would be prepared to succeed to the throne, the Grand Duke replied “May this cup pass me by. Of course, if this were, unfortunately to come about, I sympathise with the British system. I can’t understand why the Tsar won’t take it calmly.”’
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Aleksandr Kerensky, a leading socialist destined to play a decisive role in the drama to come, was also to recount an incident so astonishing and so unlike Michael that at face value it cannot seem true. ‘In the autumn of 1915’ he would recall in his memoirs, ‘I was visited by an old friend, Count Pavel Tolstoy, the son of one of the Tsar’s equerries. He was a close friend of the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Michael, whom he had known since childhood.’ So far, so good. He then went on: ‘He told me that he had come at the request of the Grand Duke, who knew that I had connections with the working class and left-wing parties and who wanted to know how the workers would react if he took over from his brother, the Tsar.’
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