The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (40 page)

Of more immediate concern to von Mirbach was the news that Michael was not only leading the Siberian revolt but that he remained an ally of Britain and France and had published a ‘manifesto’ calling on all former Tsarist officers to support him. ‘Effect of Michael Aleksandrovich’s support for Entente on generals and officers, including those of groups who lean towards us, considerable according to impressions here. Groups here have shown themselves noticeably more restrained towards us during the last week.’
³

A few days later came further confirmation to Berlin that Michael was the only possible candidate for the throne of a restored monarchy. For the Germans their evidence of that, in part, was the reaction of the people in Petrograd to news reports that Nicholas had been killed.

This wholly false story, spread by the Ural Soviet at the same time as they were announcing Michael’s ‘escape’, was that while being evacuated by special train from Ekaterinburg because of the threat posed by advancing Czechs, Nicholas had become involved in a furious row with one of his guards, and the soldier had then killed him with a bayonet thrust. The object of all this was to test both public and foreign reaction to the death of Nicholas, while covering up the real murder of Michael.

The result from the Bolshevik standpoint was encouraging, as the German despatch from Petrograd to Prince Henry confirmed just over three weeks later. The report, passed on by Henry to the Kaiser, stated that although the ‘murder’ of Nicholas on the train was widely believed,

…
the effect of this news on the masses was scarcely perceptible. Even the Russian church, whose interest can only be bound up with the imperial family, did not react in any way. Although the rumour was not retracted for almost two weeks, a requiem mass did not take place anywhere. This notoriously proved that the ex-Tsar has lost all sympathy from the people.

Grand Duke Michael is a different matter. The newspapers which carried the news of his flight and his alleged manifesto in Siberia were read feverishly and he is seen as the only possible source of deliverance from the unbearable circumstances. The famous Russian writers Kuprin and Amfiteatrov even attempted to publish a newspaper article about the Grand Duke, in which His Imperial Highness was characterised as the only Romanov not to have been discredited in any way. Both were, of course, immediately arrested.

The report, largely confirming Cromie’s assessment of German intentions, concluded: ‘only the restoration of the monarchy in Russia with German assistance…will guarantee Germany an alliance with Russia and the maintenance and support of German interests in East Europe’. What was needed was that ‘a general Church Congress, presided over by the Patriarch, offers the Grand Duke the crown’.
⁴

Here, it seemed, was proof that the Kremlin’s dead-and-alive strategy was paying off. They had given the Germans an emperor for their planned monarchy but one who was set to go to war with them, while denying them the possibility that they could credibly find an alternative. If the Bolshevik leadership had been able to read the German diplomatic cables they would have been well pleased with themselves. The threat of a German-led counter revolution was real enough, but muddying the waters was better than going back to war with them, as the Socialist Revolutionaries wanted to do — they would murder the German ambassador von Mirbach on July 16.

What was more, the Bolshevik ‘escape’ story continued to be accepted at face value by the world at large. The man they had buried in a wood outside Perm was alive and well and in Siberia. Everyone knew that, because it said so in the newspapers.

But the newspapers were printing only what seemed to be credible reports from a number of sources. A Japanese diplomatic despatch to Tokyo was picked up by the British military attaché, who promptly cabled London on July 8, 1918 that ‘a counter-revolutionary movement headed by Grand Duke Michael has started in Omsk…’
⁵
Four days later even a Moscow newspaper was reporting Michael’s reappearance. ‘Rumour has spread here’, said a report from Vyatka, ‘that the former Grand Duke Michael Romanov is in Omsk and has taken command of the Siberian insurgents. There are claims that he has issued a manifesto to the people calling for the overthrow of Soviet power and promising to convene Assemblies of the Land to resolve the question of what regime there should be in Russia.’
⁶
The stories about Michael even reached Persia where Dimitri recorded in his diary the rumours that ‘Misha is advancing on Moscow with Cossacks and has been proclaimed Emperor’.
⁷
The adage that a lie if repeated often enough becomes the truth was working well for the Kremlin.

What continued to trouble Berlin, however, were the reports that support for them was slipping away among the monarchists. As the German military attaché in Moscow observed on July 17, if Michael was leading a pro-Allied force ‘then this would place Russian officers of a monarchist tendency in a difficult position’.
⁸
However, the hopeful news on July 17,1918, was that ‘General Brusilov, formerly supreme commander, has therefore sent a lieutenant-commander to the Grand Duke to prevent him aligning himself with the Entente’.
⁹
Nothing more would be heard of that, but next day came other news which, while not of any political significance in the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, was not only to be believed but true.

It came in the form of a brief announcement by Comrade Sverdlov during a meeting of the Council of the People’s Commissars in the Kremlin that ‘at Ekaterinburg, by a decision of the Regional Soviet, Nicholas has been shot’. That was all, and after that, with no further comment, Lenin directed the comrades to continue their discussion of the draft of a new public-health law.
¹⁰
Unlike Michael, the Kremlin did not care if the world knew that Nicholas was dead, because they knew the world did not care either.

FIVE days earlier, on Friday July 12, Goloshchekin, the special envoy sent to Moscow to find out what the Kremlin wanted to do with the Romanovs in captivity, returned to Ekaterinburg to report that the answer was that the Ural Regional Soviet could do whatever it thought best. The situation was critical. Advancing Whites and Czechs were now so close that the city could fall in three days. The decision was quickly made and brutally simple: they would kill the whole family, and then next day they would kill the six Romanovs held in Alapaevsk. The executioner in the Ipatev House was to be Yacob Yurovsky, a local photographer turned secret policeman. He and a picked squad of other Cheka men would shoot Nicholas, Alexandra and the children, after which their bodies would be taken away, burned, and the remains hidden from any chance of discovery.

At midnight on Tuesday, July 16, the family was awakened by Yurovsky and told that because of the immediate military threat they were to be evacuated at once. Having dressed, they went quietly downstairs and were told to wait in a basement room while their transport was arranged. Yurovsky brought in three chairs, for Nicholas, Alexandra, and Alexis; the four girls stood in a row behind them. That done, Yurovsky re-entered the room with his Cheka death squad, and the firing began. It was pitiless slaughter, finished off with bayonet and rifle butt, and so horrific that when the truth came out it would revolt the world.
¹¹

The following day Grand Duchess Ella and the five male Romanovs at Alapaevsk were to face an even more terrible and deliberately cruel end. Taken in peasant carts to a disused mineshaft, they were then all buried alive, save for Grand Duke Serge who was shot after he tried to resist. Their killers shovelled earth and rubble on top of them, but later admitted under interrogation by the Whites who captured them shortly afterwards that they had heard hymn singing coming from the shaft for some time afterwards.
¹²

As in Michael’s case the Alapaevsk Romanovs were said to have been abducted by Whites and to have escaped. Apart from admitting the death of Nicholas, the rest of the family were said to have been evacuated to safety. The Bolsheviks also cynically continued in negotiations with the Germans for the release of Alexandra and the children, using the dead family as a bargaining tool.
¹³

They did not bother to say more about Nicholas. The announcement of his death had no more effect on public opinion than the false story of him being killed by a Red Guard five weeks earlier. In Moscow the British diplomat Bruce Lockhart noted that ‘I am bound to admit that the population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference’,
¹⁴
though that might not have been the case if they had known that five innocent children had also been murdered. When that did become known, revulsion at the massacre in Ekaterinburg — as well as the burying alive at Alapaevsk — would leave a stain on the Bolsheviks and their Soviet Union that would never wash away.

NOT knowing the truth, the Germans brushed aside the killing of Nicholas and persisted in their efforts to win over the invisible Michael. No one doubted that he was alive and in Omsk, 1,000 miles to the east of Perm, yet no one seemed to wonder why there were no reports or photographs of him actually in action — holding meetings, visiting troops, handing out medals, or sending telegrams to London, his ally in arms.

The first report of an actual ‘sighting’ of Michael was not until August 26, some ten weeks after his ‘escape’, when a British agent in Stockholm identified only as ST12 told London that ‘a Swede arrived from Omsk reports that Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich is living in the Governor’s House in Omsk with the Imperial Russian flag flying, with guards and procedures as in old regime days’.
¹⁵

By then, however, the German armies in France were on the retreat. On August 8, 1918, a British counter-offensive had smashed their lines in what the German commander General Erich von Ludendorff would call ‘a black day for the German army’. They would never recover. However, the hope in Berlin that they could at least secure an armistice which would allow them to carve out a new Russian empire was not yet entirely dashed, and in Russia itself the Germans would continue to think that it was still possible, persisting even unto the end in their aim of securing Michael’s support and thus of his ‘army’ for the German cause.

Desperate to bring good news, on August 23, the German Ukraine Delegation in Kiev sent a positive cable to Berlin to say that Michael ‘is by no means as pro-Entente as he is said to be…’
¹⁶
That seemed to confirm an earlier report that ‘attention should be paid to news which has repeatedly come in recently that certain differences of opinion exist between Grand Duke Michael and the Omsk government about the Entente, as the Omsk government is pursuing solely Russian objectives, and in any case wishes to avoid a war with Germany’.
¹⁷

By then the Germans in Russia had added reason for winning over Michael. An Allied Expeditionary Force had been sent to Murmansk on the White Sea, and although small, it had captured Archangel on August 2, 1918. The first aim of the British and French — joined later by Americans — had been to secure the stockpile of armaments sent in to supply Russia before their peace treaty in March and so that they did not fall into the hands of either the Bolsheviks or the Germans. The second aim was to re-open the war against Germany in Russia, for which they needed the support of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s advancing White Army in eastern Russia.

That was reason enough for the Germans to hope that somehow Michael could be persuaded to switch sides, and in their eagerness to win him over the Germans saw a new opportunity to earn his favour. After all, the Kaiser had already made sure that his precious son George had passed safely into family care in Denmark. Now the bait would be Natasha. They would save his beloved wife from the Bolsheviks, and the execution squad which surely otherwise awaited her in the next few weeks. Michael would then be further in their debt and that must surely bring him to accept that imperial Germany was his friend, not his foe.

NATASHA, who was then staying with her friend Maggie Abakanovich at her house on the Moika, had been told that Michael had disappeared within hours of his being taken from the hotel. Colonel Znamerovsky had cabled her that ‘Our friend and Johnny have vanished without trace’.
¹⁸
Seeking explanation she and Maggie had gone at once to the offices of Cheka boss Uritsky, who promptly arrested them both, sending them to the women’s prison on the fourth floor of his headquarters at 2 Gorokhovyana Street.
¹⁹

One of the last men to see her at the house on the Moika before her arrest was the German diplomat Armin von Reyer, a key figure in the secret negotiations between the German legation and the monarchist organisations in Petrograd. The fact that von Reyer knew where she was staying says much about German interest in Natasha. Afterwards he reported their conversation to Prince Henry in Berlin, emphasising Michael’s popularity and recounting her story of the scenes at Easter when the people of Perm had overwhelmed them with flowers and gifts.
²⁰

Von Reyer was never in any doubt that Michael was alive, for there were too many reports to think otherwise. One of the first on his desk was that Michael had been ‘brought by ship to Rybinsk’, a river port on the Upper Volga, 200 miles north-east of Moscow and about 1,000 miles westwards by river from Perm. The fact that this proved wholly wrong when more credible reports placed him some 1,600 miles to the east in Omsk, and behind friendly lines, did nothing to disturb the main point — that he had escaped his captors in Perm.
²¹