The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (2 page)

For a young Grand Duke there were few choices when it came to a career, so Michael at eighteen followed the traditional path into the military. In the army he found himself for the first time among young men of his own age, free to make friendships of his own choosing, and to follow his own pursuits — and certainly, in sporting terms, more than able to compete with his fellow officers. Standing well over six feet tall — his brother Nicholas was barely five foot seven — he swiftly became a crack shot, a skilled swordsman, and so excellent a rider he won prizes steeplechasing.

After a spell at artillery school he first joined the Horse Guards Artillery, serving with them until June 1902 when, aged twenty-three, he was transferred to the élite Guards cavalry regiment, the Blue Cuirassiers, garrisoned in Gatchina, and of which his mother was colonel-in-chief.
⁷
Michael, who took his soldiering seriously, was appointed a squadron commander. With that he moved back into his old apartment.

Gatchina palace, designed by the celebrated Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi, was deliberately unlike any of the other Romanov palaces in and around St Petersburg. Commissioned by Grigory Orlov, Catherine the Great’s lover, who had been given Gatchina as reward for helping her to depose and then dispose of her husband Peter III — strangled in 1762 to clear the way for her seizing his throne — it was built in mellowed limestone in what the Russians regarded as the ‘English style’. This meant it was on austere, simple lines, with walls left in natural stone colour rather than painted yellow, blue, or Venetian red as was the case with the other more classically-styled Romanov palaces. Surrounded by a drawbridged moat, it was said by its detractors to look more like a barracks than a royal palace, though that was one good reason for Alexander III going there. No terrorist would ever breach its security, though that may have been because no terrorist ever thought there was any chance of doing so.

Alexander III had housed his family not in the palace itself but in the adjoining quadrangle, known as the Arsenal, a place originally intended for staff, not their masters. Michael’s three-roomed apartment there was off the vaulted, low-ceilinged corridor on the mezzanine floor of the three-storey building. He had a bedroom with a single brass bed, a sitting room furnished with button-backed sofa and armchairs, a study with a desk and mahogany desk-chair, and a bathroom with a tin bath, albeit linked to hot-and-cold running water, and shelves filled with his shaving tackle and pomades.

The rooms were cluttered, as all rooms were in the style of the day, with the walls covered in family photographs and military prints. In the display cabinet in his sitting room there were sets of painted lead soldiers as well as his collection of crystal ornaments, and throughout the suite, on side tables and chairs, there could be found the
bric-a-brac
to be expected in any apartment occupied by a well-off but not overly fussy young bachelor.

What his apartment noticeably did not have was a kitchen. When he wanted something, day or night, he ordered whatever it was from the main palace, still swarming with uniformed servants, many of them in the dress of the eighteenth-century. For even though the palace no longer had a place in the official business of empire, it continued to function as before, with sailors manning boats on the lake, soldiers on guard at the doors, and important functionaries issuing orders to gardeners, footmen, cooks, maids and liveried menservants. Sometimes his mother would return for a week or so and then the palace would bustle around the business of luncheon and dinner parties and in opening shutters on rooms closed for most of the year. But otherwise the vast palace primarily served the needs of those who worked there, the kitchens cooking meals for the staff, not for its imperial master, the maids cleaning rooms which from day-to-day only they would walk through.

Thus, modest though his own private apartments were, Michael needed no more. He could entertain whenever he wished in the main palace, or under the magnificent painted ceilings of the eighteenth-century Pavilion of Venus in the great park outside.

His fellow officers were free to boat on its lakes, stroll in its gardens, take girls for winter sleigh rides, shoot in its woods, and on occasion dance in its ballroom. So although only Michael could call it home, the palace was full of life throughout the year, and a vibrant part of the social world both within the Blue Cuirassiers and the town itself.

Gatchina, founded in 1796, was a graceful place to live. There were houses painted primrose-yellow, standing in large country-style gardens, elegant apartment blocks, imposing public buildings, and two great churches, the Cathedral of St Paul and the Church of the Intercession of Our Lady, which lay at the head of the main boulevard. Although its usual population was only 18,000, in the summer that greatly expanded as the trains from St Petersburg, just an hour away, pulled into the town’s two railway stations and disgorged families, servants, dogs and the mounds of luggage which marked the annual exodus from the capital to the summer
dachas
in and around Gatchina. There were evening concerts in the palace park, sailing on the two great lakes around the town, and leisurely dinners in the crowded restaurants on the tree-lined boulevards. And always and everywhere the delicious murmur of scandals, real or imagined.

Michael, as the town’s own Grand Duke, was rarely the subject of critical gossip and woe betide anyone from the capital who thought of doing so in earshot of any resident of Gatchina. He was popular, greatly admired, and the Grand Duke whom the town was proud to think of as its own. He was never accompanied by guards or officials or courtiers and he never exhibited any signs of rank. Walking openly through the streets he would stop and cheerfully chat to the locals, patting their children, and often quietly helping those in need — though sometimes he was known to be too trusting for his own good, giving aid where none was deserved.

This approval of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich was echoed well beyond the narrow world of Gatchina itself. His brother-in-law Sandro wrote of him that ‘he fascinated everybody by the wholehearted simplicity of his manner. A favourite with his family, with his fellow officers, and with all his countless friends, he possessed a well-organised mind and would have succeeded in any branch of the service.’
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His cousin and close friend, Prince Nicholas of Greece, observed that ‘he was a very keen soldier and a real sportsman; his jovial nature endeared him to all. He was a fine, athletic young man, and went in for physical training, which he practised like a professional gymnast’.
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Yet there was much more to him than that. He spoke French and English fluently and was a competent musician on piano, flute, balalaika and guitar, composing several of his own pieces. He enjoyed the theatre, ballet and opera, and was widely-read. In one letter he listed the books he was then reading; they included
A History of the French Revolution
, a biography of Robespierre, Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment,
as well as a couple of other literary novels.

Polovtsov, a member of the state Council, and head of the Imperial Russian Historical Society, which had published several of Michael’s academic papers on the Napoleonic War,
¹⁰
judged that Michael ‘has an extraordinary strong will and once he has taken an aim in his sights he will achieve it without haste, and with undeviating firmness.’
¹¹

Sergei Witte, who had been Alexander III’s chief advisor and who twelve years later became Russia’s first prime minister after the convulsions of the 1905 Revolution forced Nicholas to agree to the formation of an elected Duma, or parliament, was another who spoke highly of Michael. He had taught him political science and economics,
¹²
and he had long made little secret of his view that Michael was to be preferred to Nicholas. One senior courtier observed that Witte ‘never tired of praising his straightforwardness.’
¹³
Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich wrote that ‘Witte sees in him a clear mind, an unshakeable conviction in his opinions, and a crystalline moral purity.’
¹⁴

Dr E. J. Dillon, the widely-respected correspondent of the London
Daily Telegraph
, quoted Witte as saying that ‘if Alexander III had lived, or if his son Michael had succeeded him or were yet to come to the throne, much might be changed for the better, and Russia’s international position strengthened.’
¹⁵

Comments such as this were taken seriously at the time, for in 1899 Michael’s elder brother George had been found dying beside his overturned motorcycle near his home in the Caucasus, and with that Michael, still only twenty, had become heir to the throne, for although Nicholas had daughters he had as yet no son to succeed him.

In eighteenth-century Russia there had been empresses reigning in their own right — the widow of Peter the Great, his daughter Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great — but after Paul I succeeded his mother, whom he hated, he ruled that henceforth no woman was eligible to take the crown; that law had been accepted as binding ever since.

Six weeks before Michael found himself heir, Alexandra had been delivered of her third child, Marie, and after that it was noticed that Nicholas ‘set off on a long solitary walk’, although when he came back he seemed as ‘outwardly unruffled as ever.’
¹⁶
Obsessed with her need to produce a male heir, Alexandra quickly became pregnant again in the autumn of 1900, though it seemed that it might be too late, for Nicholas had fallen gravely ill on holiday in the Crimea and there were fears that he might die. He had intestinal typhus, a disease which in those days often proved fatal. In that event, Michael would automatically succeed his brother as Emperor.

Alexandra refused to accept that, insisting to gathering ministers that even if Nicholas died, the posthumously-born child, if a boy, should be declared Tsar and that in the meantime she should rule Russia as Regent on behalf of her womb. The ailing Nicholas ‘sided with his wife’. Court minister Baron Fredericks reported that Nicholas thought Michael ‘will get everything into a mess — he is so easily imposed upon.’
¹⁷
Witte strongly disagreed. At an impromptu conference of ministers in a Yalta hotel he ‘succeeded in winning over to my side all the members of the improvised conference. It was decided that in the event of the Emperor’s death we should immediately take an oath of allegiance to Michael Aleksandrovich.’
¹⁸

Witte, dismissed as prime minister in 1906, dated his becoming ‘the object of Alexandra’s particular enmity’ from his stand at Yalta, which she interpreted as ‘an underhand intrigue on my part against her.’
¹⁹
As it happened, it was all for nothing anyway: the Tsar recovered and when Alexandra did give birth to her fourth child, it was another girl, Anastasia. It would not be for another four years — in August 1904 — that Alexandra finally and triumphantly produced the long-awaited son and heir, named Alexis. Tragically, he would be found to be suffering from the ‘bleeding disease’ haemophilia, with any bump or bruise a threat to his life.

Six months earlier, in Germany, her sister Irene, married to the Kaiser’s brother Prince Henry, had lost her own haemophilic son to the ‘terrible illness of the English family’; years earlier, Alexandra’s own little brother had also died after he fell and bumped his head in Darmstadt. The threat was clear and terrible: Alexis’s chances of surviving childhood, or even living long into manhood, were not great.

However, that Alexis was so inflicted was not immediately apparent and in the manifesto produced on his birth Nicholas declared that in the event of his own death before Alexis was old enough to reign in his own right — 1920 — Michael was appointed Regent. Characteristically, Alexandra succeeded in adding her name as co-Regent, meaning that she and Michael would rule in tandem. With that, Michael had especial reason to pray for his brother’s well-being.

GIVEN that the life of the infant Tsarevich was at constant risk, there were very good reasons why Michael’s mother the Dowager Empress should be anxious that he married the right woman. The immediate imperial family relied upon him to be able to step in, should anything terrible happen, as it could do in those dangerous times. He was the insurance policy for the throne of his father.

There were plenty of other Grand Dukes in the line of succession, to be sure, as descendants of Alexander II or his predecessor Nicholas I, but the Dowager Empress was chiefly interested in keeping the crown in the hands of her late husband’s direct descendants, not passing elsewhere. In her mind, Michael properly married was the best hope of ensuring that future. Moreover, when she looked at the other Romanovs, there were none with the qualities she saw in her son Michael.

The family which ranked immediately behind him was headed by her brother-in-law Vladimir, who for his own reasons had always thought that he would have proved a better Tsar than his elder brother Alexander, though no one else outside his own circle shared his conviction. He had been briefly banished by Alexander after a disgraceful scene in a St Petersburg restaurant, in which he drunkenly tried to throttle a French actor whom he thought had made a pass at his wife
²⁰
, but in 1908, aged sixty-one, he was the senior Grand Duke after Michael, and stood third-in-line to the throne.