The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (29 page)

There was certainly no point in remaining in Petrograd. He had no further role to play, and was not likely to have one until and if a constituent assembly decided to support a constitutional monarchy, and that could not be for several months hence. The new government had its mandate, and needed no more. In essence, Russia now had a caretaker government and a caretaker emperor in a caretaker monarchy.

As Michael left the apartment and stepped out on to the landing, the first sight to greet him was as a surprising as it was agreeable. Lining the staircase leading down to the street was a guard of honour made up of the officers and cadets stationed in the building. There was an order to present arms and as Michael, saluting, walked down the stairs and outside into his waiting car, a cry of ‘Long Live Russia’.
²

But what might follow? Would there be hostile demonstrations at the station, agitators demanding his arrest, as the Soviet executive had done only yesterday? Michael’s manifesto, or rather the gloss the Provisional Government had put on it, was sufficient to strike out the Soviet threats against Michael, though not against his brother; passions were calmed and instead, Michael found himself going home in something akin to triumph.

Followed by another car filled with armed cadets, he and Johnson were driven off to board a special train arranged for them at the Baltic station. Joined by General Yuzefovich, his old chief of staff, he stepped out of his car and into a station ‘overcrowded with soldiers…everywhere were machine-guns and boxes of ammunition’. Flanked by his armed escort he walked to his waiting train and to another reception of the kind he had not expected. ‘A military detachment was lined up by my carriage and I greeted them, and a gathered crowd cheered me.’
³

The scene at the Baltic station, with saluting mutineers and applauding bystanders, was not without its irony. Here was its own evidence that the manifesto drafted at Millionnaya Street had served its purpose, at least in the short term. His ‘abdication’ — perception being nine-tenths of politics — had put an end to the revolution. Now Michael was being hailed, not hunted, and if Lvov, Kerensky and the others had been present at his departure, it would have given them immense satisfaction. ‘It seems that order in general is being established’, he would write that night in his diary.
⁴

The previous evening, in explanation of his manifesto, he had told Princess Putyatina that it would ‘calm the passions of the populace, make the soldiers and workers who had mutinied see reason, and re-establish the shattered discipline of the army.’
⁵
He said much the same on his return to Gatchina on Saturday afternoon. Bimbo’s brother George, still taking refuge in Nikolaevskaya Street, wrote afterwards that Michael feared that if he were to reign as Emperor ‘without knowing the wishes of the country, matters will never calm down’.
⁶

For the moment, however, he was simply glad to be home and away from the madness of Petrograd. It was hard to credit everything that had happened since he had set off for the capital only five days earlier, when his brother was Emperor and Supreme Commander in Mogilev, and he had gone to the Marie Palace to discuss what could be done with a government that had vanished that same night. Five days? It seemed a lifetime.

Inevitably Natasha, thrilled to have him back safely, would pour scorn on Nicholas. The excuse so often had been that he was doing Alexandra’s bidding, but she had not been at Pskov and had no hand in the decision to bypass Baby. How could he have been so stupid, so selfish, so blind to the consequences? There was no answer to that, and never would be. How different everything would have been — for the wider world, as it turned out, not just Russia — if Michael had come home that weekend as Regent, not as the newspapers were announcing, as ex-Emperor. Natasha could clench her fists in rage, but there was nothing that could be done about it. Nicholas had ruined the Romanovs and in ruining them had ruined Russia.

Off the streets that week because of strikes, the Petrograd newspapers returned with their first reports of the dramatic events of the past few days. With only one notable exception — Milyukov’s Kadet party newspaper
Rech
— they presented Michael’s abdication in the way the government intended. Nicholas’s manifesto was followed immediately by Michael’s, their intentional juxtaposition helping the headlines which linked both as equal abdications.

In four newspapers —
Birzhevye Vedomosti, Den, Petrogradsky
Listok
, and
Petrogradskaya Gazeta
— the headlines were identical: ‘Abdication of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich’.
⁷
There was nothing in the text itself to justify that, but the accompanying statement by the Provisional Government included the word ‘abdication’ and that in turn justified the headlines over the manifesto. Eyes glazed over the lawyer-speak below, their minds already made up by the headlines.

From ‘abdication’ grew the assumption, fed by triumphant Soviet propaganda, that the monarchy was finished. Even the British and French ambassadors seemed to think in consequence that Russia was now a republic. Both were to be corrected by Milyukov, the new foreign minister. ‘The Constituent Assembly alone will be qualified to change the political status of Russia’, he told Paléologue;
⁸
and when he heard Buchanan referring to the new government as republican, ‘he caught me up, saying that it was only a Provisional Government pending the decision of the future Constituent Assembly’.
⁹

Correcting the impression gathered by two experienced and senior ambassadors was one thing; it was quite another with the country at large. Michael had been wasting his time at the school desk it seemed. What he had signed was not his suspension of imperial power until the decision of a future constituent assembly, but his abdication. What was intended as temporary was taken as permanent. Everyone knew that, because it said so in the newspapers. Some people, reading the manifesto, would say that he had ‘refused the crown’ rather than abdicated, but the effect was the same. Michael had given up.

There were exceptions to this generally negative response. In
The Times
of London, for example, the judgement of Robert Wilton, their respected correspondent in Petrograd, was that ‘perhaps in the end it will be all for the best’. Accepting that while ‘at present we must be content to go on with the Provisional Government until quieter days supervene,’ he concluded that were it possible to bring about the Constituent Assembly ‘there could be little doubt as to the election of Grand Duke Michael to the Throne by an overwhelming majority’.
¹⁰
Following events in Yalta, Princess Cantacuzène took much the same view — ‘we looked forward to the probability of the Constituent Assembly being in favour of a constitutional monarchy’.
¹¹

Besides, as Michael might wryly have reflected, the idea of having his succession confirmed by being ‘elected’ was exactly how the Romanov dynasty came into being. The first Romanov, his namesake Michael I, had been elected by a national assembly in 1613. After 300 years, a second ‘election’ of a second Michael would change the Romanovs from autocrats into constitutional monarchs, like the British. No one on March 3, 1917 could know that a future assembly would vote to retain the monarchy, but equally no one could know that it would not. Six months is a long time, and if Russia won great victories in the summer, and the public mood improved, the picture could well look very different. Re-reading Michael’s manifesto then, what it actually said might be better understood. However, that appeared a vain hope in the immediate aftermath of its publication.

Some people would never forgive Michael for becoming Emperor but not being Emperor. Grand Duke George wrote to his wife that while ‘Misha’s manifesto seems to have calmed the republicans, the others are angry with him…’
¹²
The right-wing Duma member Vasily Maklakov, who was not at Millionnaya Street, called the manifesto ‘strange and criminal…an act of lunacy or treason, had not the authors been qualified and patriotic lawyers.’
¹³
In Tsarskoe Selo, Grand Duke Paul’s wife Princess Paley, damned Michael as ‘a feeble creature’ and ‘a weakling’,
¹⁴
though there was no surprise in her saying that.

In short, in some quarters it would be Michael who would be blamed for the fall of the House of Romanov. ‘Not us’ they would cry, ‘it was him’.

One exception in Michael’s corner was A. A. Mossolov, former head of the Court Chancellery, who observed that when Michael ‘became Emperor, those Grand Dukes who were in Petrograd failed to rally around him’
¹⁵
. Bimbo apart, that was true, although the excuse would be that either they could not get near him that day, or they did not know where he was.

But in casting blame, the ultimate responsibility for all that happened lay with Nicholas, and above all, Alexandra.

Brooding over events in faraway Persia, Dimitri was in no doubt about that. ‘The final catastrophe,’ he judged, ‘has been brought about by the wilful and short-sighted obstinacy of a woman. It has, naturally, swept away Tsarskoe Selo, and all of us, at one stroke.’
¹⁶

MICHAEL’S manifesto, in empowering the Provisional Government as lawful, also bound it to do what it promised to do, and which limited its role to that of restoring order, continuing the war, and exercising its powers only until such time as the Constituent Assembly determined the status of Russia. In particular it had no rights to pre-empt any decision reserved to the elected Assembly when it came into being.

So it seemed on March 3. The reality was very different. Michael did not surrender the Romanovs, the new government would do that for him, yielding to the clamouring pressures of the Soviet. There would be no place in the new order for Grand Dukes: their rank, privilege, wealth, land and even liberty were now at the disposal of a government in hock to the Soviet. The meeting at Millionnaya Street had not intended it, but long before any constituent assembly could come into being, the Romanovs would be out of business. Indeed, that seemed to be the case almost immediately, such was the weakness of the new government.

On his return to Gatchina Michael had assumed that he would continue with some role in the army, or at least do so when conditions allowed it. Technically he was still Inspector-General of Cavalry with the rank of colonel-general, but he was willing to serve in any capacity. He was to be immediately disappointed; there would be no job for him or any other Grand Duke.

‘They do not allow us to go the front fearing that we might start a counter-revolution,’ wrote Grand Duke George from Gatchina, though no such idea has ‘even crossed our minds.’
¹⁷
Perhaps so, but in Petrograd the government knew that the Soviet would never believe that.

On April 5, one month after he signed his manifesto, Michael noted with scarcely concealed bitterness: ‘Today I received my discharge from military service,’ adding caustically ‘with uniform’.
¹⁸
It was another pointer to the way reality had overtaken the meeting at Millionnaya Street.

Next day, Michael and Natasha, together with cousin George, went by train to Petrograd, Michael’s first visit to the capital since his manifesto. There was no imperial carriage now; they would have to travel like everyone else, buying tickets, and finding seats where they could. They were intent on organising the removal of his furniture from his mother’s home at the Anichkov Palace before it was ‘liberated’ by the workers.
¹⁹
It would be the first and only time that Natasha would ever set foot in the palace in which Michael had been born 38 years earlier.

As Michael settled down in his carriage at Gatchina, ‘a soldier came running to the compartment in which Misha sat by the window, and taking off his military fur cap, made a deep bow’. At the same station, a group of soldiers stood to attention as Grand Duke George came up to them. ‘They seemed delighted to talk to me,’ he wrote. ‘I could do anything with these soldiers who now want a republic with a Tsar!’
²⁰

For a Grand Duke to think it worth mentioning that soldiers had stood to attention when he approached them, or that one had bowed to Michael, was a measure of just how greatly discipline had deteriorated in the army over the past month. The cause of the collapse in ordinary standards was not the revolution itself, but the notorious Order No 1 which had been issued by the Petrograd Soviet on March 1 before the formation of the Provisional Government. Intended at the time to apply only to the Petrograd garrison, the ‘order’ had become widely interpreted as applying to all troops, including those in the front-line.

Guchkov, war minister in the new government, found out about Order No 1 only after it was published and he had failed to get it rescinded. On March 9, just a week after taking up his post, he had cabled Alekseev in Mogilev: ‘The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that this is permitted by the Soviet…in the military department it is possible at present to issue only such orders as basically do not contradict the decisions of the above-mentioned Soviet.’
²¹