The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

10. ‘MAKE YOURSELF REGENT’

BACK home in Gatchina on Saturday, February 4, Michael telephoned his brother-in-law Sandro in Petrograd. Had there been any sign that Nicholas was ready to make concessions— anything hopeful at all — while he had been away at the front? The answer was depressingly No. Michael arranged to meet Sandro in the capital, and then proposed that the two of them should go together to Tsarskoe Selo in yet another desperate attempt to persuade him to see sense, appoint a responsible government, and take his wife out of politics altogether.¹ Sandro agreed, but suggested that he first went there and confronted Alexandra privately. What had to be said to her in front of Nicholas would come better from him alone than with Michael. At least his wife Xenia, as the Tsar’s sister, could not be accused of being in ‘a bad set’.

Arriving in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexandra reluctantly agreed to meet Sandro. Nicholas led him into her mauve bedroom. ‘Alix lay in bed, dressed in a white negligée embroidered with lace…I kissed her hand and her lips just skimmed my cheek, the coldest greeting given me by her since the first day we met in 1893. I took a chair and moved it close to her bed, facing a wall covered with innumerable icons lit by two blue-and-pink church lamps.’

With Nicholas standing silently, puffing away on his cigarettes, Sandro told her bluntly that she had to remove herself from politics. Their exchange became heated, until all pretence at politeness vanished. ‘Remember Alix, I remained silent for thirty months!’ he shouted at her in a wild rage. ‘For thirty months I never said as much as a word to you about the disgraceful goings-on in our government — better to say in your government! I realise that you are willing to perish and that your husband feels the same way, but what about us? Must we all suffer for your blind stubbornness? No, Alix, you have no right to drag your relatives with you into a precipice. You are incredibly selfish!’

Alexandra stared at him coldly. ‘I refuse to continue this dispute’, she replied tersely. ‘You are exaggerating the danger. Some day, when you are less excited, you will admit that I knew better.’

He got up, kissed her, received no kiss in reply, and strode out in anger. He would never see Alexandra again.

Passing through the mauve salon he went straight to the library, ordered a pen and paper and sat down to write a report on his meeting for Michael. As he did so, he looked up and saw the Tsar’s ADC watching him, as if on guard. The aide refused to leave, and ‘in a fury’ Sandro stood up and stormed out of the palace.²

The next day he returned with Michael. Meeting them in his study, Nicholas smoked, listened impassively, but seemed deaf to anything that Michael said as he tried in vain to impress upon his brother that without change he faced disaster. Sandro judged that they were ‘wasting his time and ours’ and when it came his turn to support Michael’s arguments he found by the end that ‘I was hardly able to speak…emotion choking me’.³

With that, Sandro gave up in despair. However, Michael told him he would try yet again, hopeless though it seemed, and on Friday February 10 — six days after coming back from the front — he drove once more to Tsarskoe Selo.⁴ The meeting in Nicholas’s study was as pointless as the earlier one, though it was interrupted by the arrival of Rodzyanko. Nicholas agreed to see him, and went out into the audience chamber.

Rodzyanko was standing with a report from the Duma which simply underlined the points which Michael and Sandro had been making, but ‘the Emperor listened not only with indifference but with a kind of ill-will’, recounted Rodzyanko. ‘He finally interrupted me with the request that I hurry a bit, as Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich was waiting for him to have a cup of tea.’⁵

Four days later Sandro wrote to his brother Nicholas about his depressing meetings at Tsarskoe Selo, and added that Michael ‘can also see no way out, except sending her to Livadia’⁶ — the imperial estate in the Crimea. Yet suddenly a week later there was a moment of hope that in fact Nicholas had been listening and had finally yielded to the arguments put to him that change was imperative. He told his prime minister Prince Golitsin that he was prepared to go to the Duma next day, Tuesday, February 22, and concede to the demands for a responsible ministry. But just as suddenly he changed his mind, and instead of going to the Tauride Palace he ordered his train and went off in the opposite direction — disappearing back to Stavka.

Next day Alexandra dashed off a letter to him, urging him as she had always urged him — ‘Be firm…’⁷

His reply showed a touch of irritation but also the extent of his own self-deception. ‘What you write about being firm — the master — is perfectly true. I do not forget it — be sure of that, but I need not bellow at the people right & left every moment. A quiet sharp remark or answer is enough very often to put the one or other in his place…’⁸

That would never be enough ever again.

THE revolution intended to come from above came instead from below and without any real warning. It was a spontaneous rising, with no master-plan or even a decisive leader who could be identified afterwards. Unrest become disturbance, disturbance grew into rebellion, and then in turn into revolution. And yet all this was in large part confined to the capital, with the rest of the country unaffected, at least in the beginning, and with some regions unaware of events until they were all over. The ostensible cause was fear of a bread shortage; although supplies were adequate the fear was self-fulfilling in that housewives hoarded, creating the shortage. But that was only one of many factors. There had been large-scales strikes, following a lock-out of workers at the giant Putilov factories, with an estimated 158,000 men idle by late February. Petrograd itself was a vast military camp, with 170,000 armed troops in barracks, many of them susceptible to agitators — among them German agents actively fermenting resentment in the hope of bringing about a revolution that would remove Russia from the war.

In Gatchina on Saturday February 25 — just three weeks after returning from the front — Michael noted that ‘there were disorders on Nevsky Prospekt today. Workmen were going about with red flags and throwing grenades and bottles at the police, so that troops had to open fire. The main cause of disorders is — lack of flour in the shops.’⁹ The day left six dead and some 100 injured.

But what was most alarming was that one of the dead was a police inspector who, intent upon seizing a red flag, was killed by a Cossack trooper as he rode into a crowd of demonstrators gathered around a statue of Alexander III in a square beside the Nicholas station, the main terminus for Moscow.¹⁰ The Cossacks were the traditional scourge of rioters and demonstrators — and if they were no longer reliable, no one was.

Next day, Sunday, there were placards all around the city, forbidding meetings or gatherings, with notices that troops were authorised to fire to maintain order. The crowds took no notice of these warnings and that evening Michael noted in his diary that ‘the disorders in Petrograd have gathered momentum. On the Suvorov Prospekt and Znamenskaya Street there were 200 killed.’¹¹

More ominously, a company of the élite Pavlovsk Guards had mutinied in their barracks, and when their colonel came into confront them he was attacked and his hand cut off.¹² With that, the mutineers had no way back: it was revolution or the hangman’s noose.

A desperate Rodzyanko telegraphed the Tsar. ‘The capital is in a state of anarchy. The government is paralysed…General discontent is growing. There is wild shooting in the street. In places troops are firing at each other.’ There must be a new government, under someone trusted by the country’, he urged as he had so often urged before, except that this time he warned that ‘any procrastination is tantamount to death…’¹³

Reading that, Nicholas dismissed it as panic. ‘Some more rubbish from that fat Rodzyanko’.¹⁴ However he did decide to put together a loyal force and despatch it to the capital, and to return to Tsarskoe Selo himself. That should settle matters. The rebel soldiers were no more than an armed rabble. They would never stand against proper frontline troops.

That complacent view was easier held in Mogilev than in the streets of Petrograd. The rebels indeed were not frontline soldiers but depot reservists, many of them new recruits, the scrapings of the military barrel. Their officers were mainly men convalescing after being wounded at the front, or young inexperienced subalterns fresh from the military academies. It was certain, observed the British military observer Colonel Alfred Knox, that ‘if the men went wrong, the officers were without the influence to control them’.¹⁵

Military discipline was a thin veneer which was easily stripped away, turning such troops into a uniformed mob. Nevertheless, they had guns and were as well-armed as any soldiers being sent to face them. By noon on Sunday, only some 24 hours into the disorders, 25,000 troops had gone over to the side of the demonstrators; however among the rest there were few willing to march out either for them or against them. The bulk of the available forces simply stayed in their barracks as the rebels and the mob took command of the streets.

The Arsenal on the Liteiny was captured, putting into the hands of the rebels thousands of rifles and pistols, and hundreds of machine-guns. The headquarters of the Okhrana, across the Neva and opposite the Winter Palace, as well as a score of police stations, were overrun and set on fire. The prisons were opened and their inmates freed, criminals as well as political detainees. By the evening of that second day, only the very centre of the city, around the Winter Palace, could be said still to be in government control.¹⁶

Michael would begin his diary entry for Monday, February 27, by writing that it was ‘the beginning of anarchy’.¹⁷

AS Michael was composing his diary, Nicholas was puffing on a cigarette in his quarters at Stavka, reading a letter newly arrived from Alexandra. Having told him that three of the children had gone down with measles, she was otherwise cheerful and confident about the events in the capital, for all around her agreed that it was nothing like as serious as the revolution of 1905, which had begun with a massacre of demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace on what history remembered as ‘Bloody Sunday’. The difference was ‘because all adore you & only want bread… it seems to me it will be alright — the sun shines so brightly.’ There was also the consolation of her prayers at the grave of Rasputin. ‘I felt such peace & calm on His dear grave — He died to save us.’¹⁸

Nicholas was also striving to be calm. The day before, in church, he had felt ‘an excruciating pain in the middle of my chest, which lasted for quarter of an hour. I cannot understand what it was, as I had no heart beating, but it came & left me at once when I knelt before the Virgin’s image.’¹⁹ Writing to say ‘how happy I am at the thought of meeting you in two days’ he then reported that ‘after the news of yesterday from town — I saw many faces here with frightened expressions.’ Not knowing that his chief of staff had been involved in a plot with Prince Lvov to get rid of him, he added: ‘Luckily Alekseev is calm…’²⁰

There was also reassuring news from the capital. Early that afternoon the war minister General Mikhail Belyaev cabled Mogilev to tell Nicholas that while ‘it has not yet been possible to crush the rebellion… I am firmly convinced that calm will soon arrive. Ruthless measures are being adopted to achieve this. The authorities remain totally calm.’²¹ If he had written ‘totally panic-stricken’ it would have been nearer the mark, but Belyaev, appointed only seven weeks earlier, could not bring himself to admit that he had already lost control of the army in Petrograd.

At the Tauride Palace the Duma was in uproar. Just 13 days after its new session had begun, deputies arrived to find that the Duma had been shut down again. Prince Golitsin, the third prime minister in the past year and a reluctant appointee, had used a ‘blank’ decree to prorogue the Duma, thinking it would defuse tension by silencing the more radical elements.²²

However, the deputies refused to disperse, adjourned to another chamber in the building, and set up a ‘temporary committee’ under the chairmanship of their president Rodzyanko. Within 24 hours this would claim to be the de facto government.

That said, none of them had any idea of what their role could be. ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’ Rodzyanko cried out in vain hope of any answer.²³ Another Duma member recalled that ‘we did not have an idea of what was happening and certainly no plan or idea of how to deal with it’.²⁴

So Rodzyanko then turned to the only man he thought could rescue them. He slipped out of the chamber and telephoned Michael in Gatchina, urging him to come to the capital immediately. The call would appear to have been around 3.45 p.m. for that was when Michael telephoned his brother-in-law Matveev at his embankment law office in Petrograd, only to be told that he had left at 3.30 p.m. and was on his way home to the Fontanka. Instead, Michael spoke to his chauffeur, telling him to be with a car at the Warsaw railway station just after six p.m. By the time Matveev was home, and telephoned Gatchina to find out what was happening, Natasha told him that Michael had already left for Petrograd with his secretary Nikolai Johnson.²⁵ Their special train left at 5 p.m.

Just over an hour later they were at Petrograd’s Warsaw station, with Michael relieved to find that ‘things were comparatively quiet.’²⁶ Met by Matveev’s chauffeur, he was whisked away to the Marie Palace on St Isaac’s Square to join an emergency conference attended by the prime minister, war minister Belyaev, Rodzyanko and other leading members of the Duma’s new ‘temporary committee’.

In the government there was only resigned defeatism. That evening the hated interior minister Protopopov had been persuaded to resign and as he shuffled off into the night he muttered that there was nothing now left to him ‘but to shoot myself’.²⁷ No one cared what he did and no one bothered to say goodbye to the man so trusted by the Empress, so despised by the nation. Yet his departure was also its own signal that the government was no more. Golitsin accepted that his ministry was finished, but did not know how to write out the death certificate. He hoped Michael would do that for him.

There was not a moment to lose. As Michael would note afterwards, ‘By 9 p.m. shooting in the streets began and almost all the armed forces became revolutionary and the old rule ceased to exist.’²⁸

So what was to be the new rule? In the conference which followed Rodzyanko would later claim that he urged Michael ‘to assume on his own initiative the dictatorship of the city… compel the personnel of the government to tender their resignations and demand by telegram, by direct wire from His Majesty, a manifesto regarding the formation of a responsible cabinet.’²⁹ These were dramatic proposals: the Duma president — who had prided himself on refusing to be a rebel — was proposing that Michael should seize power, effectively proclaim himself Regent and present his brother with a fait accompli.

Rodzyanko would later claim to be dismayed that Michael refused to follow his advice, complaining that the ‘irresoluteness of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich contributed to a favourable moment being lost. Instead of taking active measures and gathering around himself the units of the Petrograd garrison whose discipline had not yet been shattered, the Grand Duke started to negotiate by direct wire with Emperor Nicholas II.’³⁰

However, this picture of an ‘irresolute’ Michael and a decisive, ruthless and clear-headed Duma president depends on Rodzyanko’s own self-serving account, written long afterwards and published in 1922, when many of his contemporaries were revising their roles in the revolution of 1917. Rodzyanko was then anxious to rebut criticism that it was he who had proved irresolute and it is that which more easily explains his improbable scenario of February 27; it helped to excuse all that followed. In fact, as others would remark over these critical days, Rodzyanko was in ‘a blue funk’ with no idea of what to do.

What further coloured his account was that when it came to the choice of a new prime minister that evening, Michael nominated someone else for the post Rodzyanko believed was his by right. At Gatchina Michael had been more in touch with political opinion than Rodzyanko might have expected, and knew that the majority Progressive Bloc in the Duma had already opted for Prince Georgy Lvov. It was therefore his name which Michael put forward, and which the conference endorsed.

Lvov was not at the conference but he knew of the proposal to make him prime minister and had agreed to take the post if offered to him. Michael already knew that; Rodzyanko did not. Lvov was not a member of the Duma, though as long-time head of the powerful union of local authorities, the Zemstovs, he was the best known civic leader in the country and more popular and more trusted among the radical elements than the authoritarian bull-voiced Rodzyanko.

Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Kadet party, and a powerful voice in the Duma, believed that the choice of Lvov was ‘made easier by his reputation everywhere in Russia; at the time he was irreplaceable. I cannot say, however, that Rodzyanko was reconciled to the decision.’³¹ Rodzyanko would still behave as if he were leader, but his real power died that night.

Nevertheless, the two-hour conference in the Marie Palace did adopt in a broad sense the measures of which Rodzyanko would later boast himself author. Michael would telegraph his brother and convey the proposals, supported as they were by his present prime minister, that he should act as Regent in the capital, with the power to appoint a new prime minister but one competent to choose his own Cabinet, unlike those which had gone before. With his high reputation in the army, Michael as lawful Regent was well-placed to win over the vast number of troops who had stayed in their barracks; a new ‘responsible ministry’ under a respected man at its rudder, would isolate the extremists behind the disorder. The real question, however, was whether the Tsar would accept any of this.

Michael had, of course, repeatedly pressed on his brother privately the necessity for a new responsible ministry, but this was the first time he would be saying so not only openly but as spokesman for the political leadership in Petrograd. He would wrap it up in the politest of language but his message to the Tsar would be clear: the days of autocracy were over.

The next four hours would be decisive. If Nicholas accepted the reality of the disaster confronting them all, there could be a new government by the next morning, with every chance that by the end of the day, with the majority of troops who had not left their barracks rallying to Michael, the revolutionaries would have slunk off into the night. Otherwise the revolution unchecked might prove impossible to contain.

Leaving the Marie Palace, Michael crossed the square to the nearby residence of the war minister on the Moika and there at 10.30 p.m. he began his despatch to his brother.³² He was using the Hughes apparatus, a kind of primitive telex, with a keyboard, in which one party typed out a tape and then waited for a reply tape. It was slow but it was all they had for communication over such a long distance. At the receiving end in Mogilev was the sympathetic chief-of-staff Alekseev and Michael ‘talked’ to his brother through him.

Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich on the apparatus. I beg to report the following to His Majesty the Emperor on my behalf. I am firmly convinced that in order to pacify this movement, which has assumed huge proportion, it is essential to dismiss the whole Council of Ministers, a course urged on me by Prince Golitsin.

That in itself already said much. Michael, using a war ministry machine, quoting the support of the prime minister, was not in fact acting on his own behalf, but as representative voice of those the Tsar believed to be acting for him. It was a slap in the face. Michael went on: If the Cabinet is dismissed, it will be essential to appoint replacements at the same time. All I can suggest in current conditions is to settle your choice on someone who has earned Your Imperial Majesty’s trust and enjoys respect among wide sections of the population, entrusting him with the duties of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers and making him solely accountable to Your Imperial Majesty.

It is essential that he be empowered to appoint a Cabinet at his own discretion. In view of the extraordinarily serious situation, Your Imperial Majesty may wish to authorise me to announce this on behalf of Your Imperial Majesty as a matter of urgency. For my part, I would suggest that the only possible candidate at this moment is Prince Lvov. ADC General Michael.

Stripped of its apparent deference, the message could not be clearer; Michael was publicly promoting a new and responsible ministry under Prince Lvov, with a Cabinet picked by him not by Nicholas or Alexandra. For the first time, Michael was openly telling his brother that he had to sack his government, and that the days of autocracy were over.

Alekseev’s reply came back on the tape. ‘I will report Your Imperial Highness’s telegram to his Imperial Majesty immediately. His Majesty the Emperor is leaving for Tsarskoe Selo tomorrow.’

Leaving Stavka tomorrow in the middle of a crisis and out of touch while he travelled 450 miles in a train? Every hour was vital, every hour lost potentially fatal. Michael replied immediately. ‘I am convinced that it may be advisable to delay His Majesty the Emperor’s journey to Tsarskoe Selo for several days.’³³

Forty minutes later General Alekseev passed on Nicholas’s reply. It was uncompromising, almost dismissive.

Firstly. In view of the extraordinary circumstances His Majesty the Emperor does not consider it possible to delay his departure and will leave tomorrow at half past two p.m. Secondly. His Imperial Majesty will not deal with any measures touching on changes to his personal staff until his arrival in Tsarskoe Selo. Thirdly. ADC General Ivanov is leaving for Petrograd as Commander-in-Chief of the Petrograd Area and has a reliable battalion with him. Fourthly. As of tomorrow four infantry regiments and four cavalry regiments from amongst our most reliable units will begin moving from the Northern and Western Fronts to Petrograd.

Reading that, Michael knew that his brother had ignored everything he had said, and that his wire had been a waste of time, as had the discussion at the conference in the Marie Palace. Michael had been told to mind his own business.

Alekseev was clearly unhappy for he added a message of his own, directly supporting Michael’s original proposals. Allow me to conclude with a personal request that, when making personal reports to His Imperial Majesty, Your Imperial Highness will be so kind as to give firm support to the ideas which you expressed in your preceding message, both as regards to the replacement of the present members of the Council of Ministers and as regards the method by which a new Council is to be selected and may the Lord God aid Your Imperial Highness in this important matter.

Michael in reply repeated his concern that Nicholas was leaving Mogilev ‘since under the present conditions literally every hour counts…’ Alekseev agreed and promised to raise the matter at the morning conference because ‘I realise perfectly well… that time lost cannot be compensated for’.³⁴

It was a dispiriting end to a long night, in which Michael had achieved precisely nothing. He summarised his efforts in his diary, concluding with one word: Alas.³⁵

And alas indeed, for by refusing to empower his brother the Tsar now had no government at all. When the lights failed at around midnight in the Marie Palace the last of the ministers there simply drifted away into the night and they never met again. Thus, when at 11.35 that evening in Mogilev the Tsar sent off a telegram to his prime minister saying that ‘I personally bestow upon you all the necessary powers for civil rule’,³⁶ there was no prime minister, no power and no rule. Prince Golitsin had gone home. Over the next 24 hours he and most of the Tsar’s other ministers would be arrested by the revolutionary mob and for some their ultimate fate would be a firing squad.

THE immediate question for Michael was where he went now. It was impossible to return to Gatchina immediately ‘because of heavy machine-gun fire and grenade explosions’. His secretary Johnson had hidden their car in the courtyard of the Moika building but at 3 a.m. when ‘things had quietened down somewhat’, he decided to make an attempt to reach the station, still hoping to get home if he could. However, as his car and a military escort drove through unlit streets a revolutionary patrol tried to stop them. Michael accelerated and got away, but his military escort was arrested. ‘We could not proceed further and decided to make for the Winter Palace.’³⁷

He arrived to find the war minister Belyaev with the dejected garrison commander Khabalov ‘and a force of 1,000 troops’. With only a few machine-guns and little artillery they had been defending the Admiralty but were marched out when their commander General Zankevich decided that it would be more symbolic ‘to die in defence of the palace’.

Michael recognised a different kind of symbolism — that it had been from the Winter Palace that troops had fired on the crowds marching into the palace square in January 1905, killing men, women and children. Michael had been with his brother at Tsarskoe Selo that day and twelve years later the memory, and the lesson of the revolution which followed, remained with him. Whatever the events of the next hours and days, if there was to be any chance of restoring order, he was not prepared to allow another ‘Bloody Sunday’, and hand the revolutionaries a propaganda victory that could only add fuel to the flames. Moreover, the Winter Palace was indefensible. Across the Neva were the rebel guns of the Fortress of St Peter and St. Paul. They could reduce the Winter Palace to rubble if they chose to open fire.

Tersely, the garrison commander was told to remove his troops back to the stronger and less politically sensitive Admiralty, ‘the poor General Khabalov’ being ‘very grateful’ to avoid a battle he could only lose.³⁸

That done, where was he to go? It was 5 a.m. and he needed refuge close by and quickly. The best idea seemed the apartment of his old friend Princess Putyatina at 12 Millionnaya Street, just 500 yards away, and opposite the palace of Bimbo, banished by the Tsar for defending Dimitri.

He and his weary secretary Johnson slipped out of the Winter Palace into the courtyard of the adjacent Hermitage then, watching out for revolutionary patrols, waited until their path was clear before running across the snow-covered road and knocking on the door of No 12.³⁹

The concierge heard their banging and recognising Michael’s voice opened up before leading them up two flights of stairs to the apartment of Princess Putyatina, using her pass-key to admit them inside. The princess, whose husband Pavel was away at the front, was alone with her young daughter. ‘I woke with a start hearing violent knocking on my bedroom door. At this noise, seized with fright, I could only imagine that armed soldiers had burst into my apartment.’ She was relieved when she recognised the voice of Johnson. Dressing hurriedly she went into the study where Michael was waiting. He was ‘very tired and seemed very upset’, but apologised with his ‘usual good grace’ for having disturbed her, adding: ‘Are you not afraid, Princess, of putting yourself at such risk by having such a dangerous guest?’⁴⁰

Her maid produced coffee and they were gratefully sipping it when they heard boots on the stairs and the sounds of shouting from the apartment above. A revolutionary squad, forcing their way through the service entrance at the rear of the building, had come to arrest the Tsar’s chamberlain, Nicholas Stolypin, a brother of the former prime minister Peter Stolypin, assassinated in a Kiev theatre six years earlier. He was dragged away, but as they held their breath there was no knock on their door — or not yet.

Break-ins of suspected homes would be commonplace over the next days as mutineers went around the city looking for officials and ministers associated with the Tsar’s government, or who were simply people judged to be enemies of the revolution. Princess Putyatina had so far been lucky, her concierge telling rampaging mobs that in her apartment was only a soldier’s wife and child. She was not likely to remain so, however, if the mutineers learned that the Tsar’s brother was there, in an unguarded building they could enter with one blow of a rifle butt.

For the moment that was a problem for the morrow. Silently, but gratefully, Michael and Johnson collapsed exhausted on settees and went to sleep.