The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (32 page)

As it happened, they were now to be embroiled in another plot which never existed, the so-called ‘Kornilov Affair’, an event which this time was to prove more tragedy than farce.

At 3 a.m. on Tuesday, August 29, eight days after the order placing them under house arrest, Michael and Natasha were awaked by an excited Gatchina commandant and told that they had to be ready to leave for Petrograd in an hour’s time with their family. The house was to be evacuated. Wakening the children and staff, and quickly packing suitcases for the unknown ahead, they trooped downstairs only to find that the military drivers could not get Michael’s cars started.

Michael watched them struggling for a while, and then suggested that it would be best if they called out his chauffeur to help. Eventually they did so, and he started the cars for them, his face saying what he thought of these bungling drivers. In consequence it was not until 5.10 a.m., 70 minutes later than ordered, that the convoy set out for Petrograd.
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From the viewpoint of their nervous guards it was just in time. The Supreme Commander General Lavr Kornilov had ordered his crack Third Cavalry Corps to advance on the capital and Michael’s ‘private army’, his beloved Savage Division, was marching on Gatchina, and was so close it would be in the woods around it within hours.

GENERAL Kornilov had intended to strengthen the government, not rebel against it. He had replaced Brusilov in mid-July after the failure of the ‘Kerensky Offensive’ launched on June 18, and he was determined to restore discipline in the army, including the reimposition of the death penalty. No army could wage war when regiments refused to advance or simply deserted to the rear whenever the enemy counter-attacked. The ‘Kerensky Offensive’ had shown that ‘the world’s first democratic army’ would, when tested, vote with its feet.

Kornilov, the son of a Cossack peasant, and the man who had formally placed Alexandra under house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo in March, did not think of himself as a rebel—‘I despise the old regime’, he said
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— but he wanted a strong government which could free itself of its dependency on the dictating policies of the Soviet and the Bolsheviks.

On August 7, he ordered General Aleksandr Krymov on the Romanian Front to move his Third Cavalry Corps northwards so that it could deal with any attempted coup by the Bolsheviks in either Petrograd or Moscow. He was prepared, he told his chief-of-staff, to disperse the Soviet, hang its leaders, and finish off the Bolsheviks.
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As they headed north there came intelligence reports that the Bolsheviks, Lenin having quietly returned, had regrouped and were planning another attempt at seizing power in the capital. On August 22 Kerensky asked Kornilov to send a cavalry corps to defend the government, but intending that this corps, when in the capital, would then come under his direct control, not Kornilov’s. It would then give him a force not only able to deal with the Bolsheviks, but with any attempt by the right to mount a counter-revolutionary attack against him. He would cover a threat from either or both.

This ploy backfired. The Third Cavalry Corps, which included the Savage Division and two Cossack divisions, as well as artillery, was what he would be getting and not the ‘democratic’ and biddable divisions he had expected. The Third Cavalry Corps, commanded by General Krymov, the ‘political’ general who had been one of the key figures in the Guchkov conspiracy which had been intent six months earlier on capturing Nicholas in his train, was staffed by monarchist officers, and its men were immune from Soviet and Bolshevik indoctrination. Kornilov, it seemed, was sending a Trojan Horse.

Certainly, Boris Savinkov, Kerensky’s emissary at Mogilev, saw it that way. He urged that Krymov be replaced and he also sought to have the Savage Division, known to be loyal to Michael, and commanded by his old friend Prince Bagration, removed from the corps.
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Kornilov ignored him. There was no point, he said, in sending a corps ‘acceptable’ to the Soviet and Bolsheviks. If Krymov and the Savage Division scared Petrograd, then that was precisely what was required. As he told his chief-of-staff, they might not like it, but they would thank him afterwards.
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Kerensky was now caught between a determined Kornilov and a clamouring Soviet, and unable any longer to claim the middle ground. Persuading himself that Kornilov’s real intent was to arrest him and the rest of the government, he decided to brand Kornilov a traitor and to present his advancing columns as a counter-revolution. The fact that Kerensky himself had ordered him to send troops was no longer the point: Kornilov’s crime was that he had sent the ‘wrong’ troops.

In the early hours of August 27, after a Cabinet meeting called to deal with ‘the emergency’ Kerensky demanded and was given dictatorial powers and what remained of the Provisional Government in all practical sense ceased to exist. After sending Kornilov a cable sacking him as Supreme Commander, Kerensky asked the Soviet to help in defending the revolution; they promptly set up a military committee which almost at once fell into the hands of those who were Bolshevik in all but name. On their authority some 40,000 weapons were issued to the workers so that they could defend ‘democracy’.
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Kerensky, as he would soon find to his cost, had armed the very people determined to overthrow him and replace the Soviet with themselves.

Kornilov, enraged by his dismissal, defiantly declared his intent to ‘lead the people to victory over the enemy to a constituent assembly where it will decide its own destiny and choose its own political system’
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— precisely the aims set out in Michael’s manifesto six months earlier. Unfortunately this last-minute rebellion made it look as if he had intended to rebel from the outset. His generals were sympathetic but confused. The army as a whole would not support what looked like a counter-revolution. Kornilov was on his own.

The Third Cavalry Corps in the event was also hesitant. At his own headquarters in Luga, 70 miles from the capital, Krymov did not know, with Kornilov sacked, if he was obeying or disobeying his orders. Two days later, on August 29, as his columns reached Tsarskoe Selo, and his Savage Division arrived at Gatchina, he received a telegram from Kerensky claiming that Petrograd was calm, no disorders were expected, and ‘there is no need of your corps’. He was ‘commanded’ to stop the advance ordered by the sacked Kornilov.
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Krymov was stopped in his tracks. Two days later he went to Petrograd at Kerensky’s invitation and met him at the Winter Palace. Denying any intent to rebel, he pointed out that he had been advancing in support of the government, not against it, as ordered by Kornilov and at the request of Kerensky himself. Unjustly accused, he left the meeting in despair, all hope gone of a fresh start for Russia. Going to a friend’s apartment, he wrote a letter to Kornilov and another to his wife; that done he put a revolver to his head and shot himself.
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Next day, September 1, Kerensky appointed himself Supreme Commander and declared, in open breach of the very constitution he had sworn to Michael to defend — ‘to carry the precious vessel of your authority to the Constituent Assembly without spilling a drop’ — that Russia was now ‘a democratic republic’.

ON that first day of the new ‘republic’ the man who was still its last Tsar remained under arrest in Petrograd, seventy-two hours after being taken from Gatchina. Michael and Natasha, their two children, their British governess Miss Neame, and the faithful Johnson, had been taken first to military headquarters, and then told that they were be housed under guard in a small apartment on the Morskaya. Escorted by 65 soldiers, packed into a convoy of trucks, they were taken in their cars and led into their new ‘prison’. Michael immediately protested. ‘The premises were absolutely unfit for our stay, without any elementary convenience, and with only three beds’, he complained.
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Faced with a furious Natasha — never one to keep silent in any circumstances —and a stubborn Michael, the officer in charge seemed incapable of simply locking the door and leaving them to make the best of it. Instead, he looked helplessly from one to another, not knowing what to do. Michael took over. Johnson was sent out to find a telephone and call Matveev. Fortunately he was at home, and offered to put them all up in his spacious apartment.

That settled matters. The officer gave in, went off to telephone his superiors, and came back to say that permission had been granted, provided that a guard was stationed outside Matveev’s door. With that, they all trooped downstairs to their waiting cars, and followed by their truckloads of armed soldiers, drove off to the Fontanka.

Having been awaked in the middle of the night, they were all exhausted by the time they reached Matveev’s apartment in the early evening, the children fretful, and hungry. As the door closed behind them, and the sentries took up their position on the landing outside, Michael was outraged. ‘That is how dangerous criminals are guarded!’ he wrote angrily in this diary that night. ‘We cannot find out anything about ourselves and we are frustrated and melancholic.’
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What made his situation worse was that in the next days his stomach problem flared up again, and Natasha always frantic about his health, insisted on specialists being allowed to see him. Three of them arrived the following Monday, September 4, and after examining him recommended a strict diet, hot-water bottles, and complete rest— ‘but where can one find that under present circumstances?’ he asked.
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That evening, at 9 p.m., Kerensky’s ADC Grigorev arrived, with the welcome news that Michael was to be released shortly.

This change of heart appears to have been after an intervention by the British ambassador, Buchanan, to whom Johnson had been despatched in the hope that he could help. Buchanan in turn saw Tereshchenko, the foreign minister in this rump Provisional Government. Buchanan then also reported matters to London, in a cable to Lord Stamfordham, the king’s private secretary, circulated to the Cabinet.

‘The poor Grand Duke Michael has, I am afraid, had rather a bad time of it lately…I protested strongly to Tereshchenko against the treatment to which HIH has been subjected and Tereshchenko in turn spoke to Kerensky. From what Tereshchenko has since told me I hope that the Grand Duke will be released at once.’
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He was not, in fact, released, but Tereshchenko did agree that Michael and his family could go back to Gatchina, subject to remaining under guard. After nine days locked into an apartment in Petrograd, they were back home by midnight on Wednesday, September 6, 1917.

‘Our cortege consisted of five cars, two of them ours,’ Michael recorded. ‘Natasha, children, Kosmin and I were in the Packard, in the front were Neame, Johnson and the Commandant, at the rear —the Rolls-Royce with the guard. As soon as we arrived I went to bed. It was so nice to be back home at last.’
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Though he would never know it, three days before his arrest in Gatchina on August 29, Tereshchenko had gone to see Buchanan to tell him that it had been decided to allow Michael to go abroad though, as Buchanan duly reported to London, he ‘begged me that what he had told me might be kept secret.’
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That was unlikely to have been kindness, for there was none of that around in August 1917. Almost certainly, Kerensky’s aim was to get Michael out of the country, and remove him as a potential figurehead for the counter-revolution he so feared. If so, it was too late for that. The following day, he was facing the prospect of Kornilov’s corps advancing into the capital, and 24 hours after that the Savage Division was almost in Gatchina. Arresting Michael, not freeing him, was the only option then for a desperate Kerensky.

Would Michael have been allowed into England if he had been freed to go there? Buckingham Palace had shut its doors to him and any other Grand Duke back in March. But with their own House of Windsor in place, and their German roots buried under new titles, had cousin George V relented?

The answer was that he had not. Buchanan could plead as he had done, but he was wasting his time. The doors of Buckingham Palace remained not merely shut, but locked and bolted. Michael was a Romanov and for that, he was damned.

IT would not be until the following Wednesday, September 13, three weeks after his first arrest, that Michael was told he was free at last. ‘But why we were under arrest is unknown, and of course, no accusations were made, there couldn’t be. Where is the guarantee that this won’t be repeated?’ It seemed that there was no intention of that. Two days later, ‘quite unexpectedly,’ an apologetic Kosmin returned to Gatchina and ‘brought me a written permit to go to the Crimea whenever we wished’.
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After all that had happened, that was cheering news. Perhaps they should go there for the winter? Maybe better times were ahead after all. Michael had shrugged off Kerensky’s announcement that Russia was now a republic — republic or monarchy, what did it matter, he wrote, ‘if only there is order and justice in the land’.
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And perhaps there would be: elections for the new Constituent Assembly had been fixed for November 12 and the resultant Assembly was due to convene on November 28. Whatever Kerensky and his Soviet allies did in the next weeks, their time of arbitrary rule was drawing to a close. The Russian people would decide the future, and there would be a new and elected government, not these men who had made such a botch of affairs in the past months. For years the leading politicians of the day had clamoured that they were best placed to take the country forward, but having been handed the torch by Michael, they had proved incapable of keeping it alight. It was very dispiriting.