The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

11. ADDRESS UNKNOWN

AS Michael was slipping out of the Winter Palace and making his way to Millionnaya Street in the pre-dawn of Tuesday, February 28, the train carrying his brother back to Tsarskoe Selo was leaving Mogilev, its windows darkened, its passengers asleep. Another train, carrying members of his suite, had set off an hour earlier, at 4 a.m.¹ After the telegraph exchange with Michael, the start-time had been moved forward from 2.30 p.m. because it had been decided to take a roundabout route back, so as to leave the direct line to Petrograd clear for the relief force ordered to the capital. The change would mean adding nine hours and 200 miles to the normal journey. With luck he would arrive home at around eight o’ clock the following morning, Wednesday.

‘Every hour is precious,’ Michael had told his brother on the wire from the war ministry on Monday night, and he had urged him not to leave Mogilev at all, so that he could be in direct communication throughout the crisis. On his train, Nicholas would be virtually incommunicado. Russia no longer had a government and over the next crucial twenty-seven hours or more it would, for all practical purposes, be without an emperor. If, that is, all went to plan.

Nicholas had gone to bed in the train at 3.15 a.m. having talked late with General Nikolai Ivanov,² the former commander on the south-western front and the man now charged with restoring order in the capital and beyond. What Nicholas hoped was that when he reached Tsarskoe Selo next morning he would hear that Ivanov had crushed the rebellion.

Ivanov had been given a crack battalion comprising 800 men who had each won the Cross of St George,³ and from Mogilev Alekseev had commanded the despatch of reliable battle-hardened formations to be sent on the direct rail route to the capital, giving Ivanov another four infantry and four cavalry regiments, plus artillery.⁴

Late that Tuesday afternoon, Alexandra received at Tsarskoe Selo a confident telegram: ‘Left this morning at 5. Thoughts always together. Glorious weather. Hope you are feeling well and quiet. Many troops sent from front. Fondest love. Nicky. The telegram, sent from Vyazma at 3 p.m. arrived at Tsarskoe Selo less than two hours later, at 4.49 p.m.⁵ Some things still seemed to be working.

It was certainly reassuring news. Vyazma was 420 miles away, and if the trains kept to schedule, Nicholas would be home as planned, for breakfast on Wednesday. Darkness had fallen when the telegram arrived, but Alexandra knew that all around the palace were well-armed and reliable troops who would stand guard throughout the night.

The men protecting the imperial palace were hand-picked and their personal loyalty to the Tsar was beyond question. There were Guardsmen, Cossacks of the Emperor’s Escort, artillerymen, riflemen, and the tall marines of the Garde Equipage, whose proud commander was Grand Duke Kirill.⁶ They were not just crack troops — as Alexandra said to her loyal confidante, Lili Dehn, they were ‘our personal friends’.⁷

Rodzyanko doubted that, given the tumult in the capital. He sent a message urging Alexandra to evacuate the palace and put herself and her family on a train⁸ — which made no sense at all at Tsarskoe Selo, given that the Tsar was heading towards the palace in his train, and Ivanov and his battalion of heroes were hastening towards them, followed by eight regiments of frontline troops.

Yet there were grounds for concern. Truckloads of mutineers had arrived in the town itself, but their revolutionary fervour had been diverted into looting the wine shops.⁹ There was the sound of shooting beyond the palace gates, but as darkness fell, within the ring of troops, the palace itself seemed entirely secure. In the late evening, with a black fur-coat thrown over her nurse’s uniform, Alexandra and her 17-year-old daughter Marie walked among the troops, praising them for their loyalty.¹⁰

When she came back, Alexandra seemed ‘possessed by some inward exaltation. She was radiant. They are all our friends…so devoted to us, ’ she told Lili Dehn.¹¹ By morning, Nicholas would be back, and Ivanov marching into town. All was well.

Nicholas still expected to be back on schedule. At around 4 a.m. on Wednesday morning he was less than 100 miles away, having covered 540 miles since leaving Mogilev. It was then that the train stopped, at the town of Malaya Vishera, an alarmed aide hurrying into his carriage to tell him that revolutionaries had blocked the line ahead.¹² It was the bitterest of moments for Nicholas; no more than five hours from home, and he could go no further.

Since he had no troops save for a few train guards, there was no hope of fighting their way forward. That being so, there was only one choice for them: the two trains would have to go back to Bologoe, halfway between Petrograd and Moscow, and then head west for Pskov, headquarters of General Nikolai Ruzsky’s Northern Army. It was the nearest safe haven, though it would still leave Nicholas 170 miles from home and worse off than if he had stayed in Mogilev where he could command the whole of his armies. His journey had been entirely wasted.

‘To Pskov, then,’ he said curtly and retired back to his sleeping car.¹³ But once there he put his real feelings into his diary. ‘Shame and dishonour,’ he wrote despairingly.¹⁴

The return to Bologoe would take around five hours, and from there it was 221 miles on the branch line to the ancient town of Pskov. For the next and decisive 15 hours the Emperor of All the Russias would once again vanish into the empty snow-covered countryside, a second day lost.

At Tsarskoe Selo, an increasingly worried Alexandra would wait for a man who was not coming, and when she dashed off a telegram to him to find out where he was, ordering it to be sent immediately to ‘His Imperial Majesty’, it was returned, with the stark message, scrawled across it in blue pencil: ‘Address of person mentioned unknown’.¹⁵

WITH no government and a nomadic Tsar lost in a railway train going nowhere, power in Petrograd passed on Tuesday February 28 to the revolution, with competing powers in the Tauride Palace trying to establish their own agendas for the reshaping of Russia. Home of a Duma that was no more, the parliamentary building now housed a noisy mass of workers, soldiers and students, joined together in a new organisation, a Soviet on the lines which had emerged in the 1905 revolution. The few hundred respectable deputies who backed the Temporary Committee of the Duma now jostled for places in rooms and hallways packed with a thousand excited street orators, mutineers and strike leaders. It was chaos and would remain so for days to come.

When Vladimir Nabokov, a lawyer destined to play a leading part in the events of that week, arrived at the smoke-filled Tauride Palace it looked to him like an improvised camp: ‘rubbish, straw; the air was thick like some kind of a dense fog; there was a smell of soldiers’ boots, cloth, sweat; from somewhere we could hear the hysterical voices of orators, addressing a meeting…everywhere crowding and bustling confusion…’¹⁶

In that crush of people, the young man who was beginning to stand out as the dominant figure was Aleksandr Kerensky aged 36. As both a member of the Temporary Committee and as vice-chairman of the new ‘Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’, he bestrode both camps. He was also the finger of justice.

When the mutineers dragged in their first important prisoner, the chairman of the State Council Ivan Shcheglovitov, Kerensky strode up to him and shouted dramatically: ‘Your life is not in danger. The Imperial Duma does not shed blood’.¹⁷ The arrested man was led off to the Government Pavilion, a separate building with some anterooms previously reserved for ministers who had come to address the Duma. It was connected to the main hall by a glass-roofed passage and technically was not part of the parliamentary building, so that deputies avoided the stigma of ‘turning the Duma into a prison’.

There would be hundreds of men like Shcheglovitov in the next hours and days — hunted down and brought to the Tauride Palace as prisoners, fearing to be shot, and it was to Kerensky’s credit that he protected them from violence. Even the hated former interior minister Protopopov — the man who had so recently fallen on his knees before the Empress, calling out ‘Oh Majesty, I see Christ behind you’ and now the man most likely to be torn to bits — was safe once inside the Tauride Palace. Found hiding in a tailor’s shop, Protopopov, ‘trembling with terror’ was almost unrecognisable: a shrunken, frightened figure, all posturing gone. Kerensky pushed forward and stood over him. ‘Don’t touch that man’, he cried with a raised arm that commanded what was otherwise a rabble.

The crowd fell back silent as Kerensky pushed on, the cringing Protopopov trailing in his wake. ‘It looked as if he were leading him to execution, to something dreadful…Kerensky dashed past like the flaming torch of revolutionary justice and behind him they dragged that miserable little figure in the rumpled greatcoat, surrounded by bayonets.’¹⁸

Goremykin, prime minister until the previous year, was another prisoner brought in, though at first he was treated with special consideration on the insistence of the ‘old school’ Duma deputies. It would be a brief respite.

Kerensky found him in Rodzyanko’s room. ‘In a corner sat a very old gentleman, with exceedingly long whiskers. He wore a fur coat, and looked like a gnome.’ Kerensky, noting that he had taken the trouble to hang round his neck the Order of St Andrew, refused to be impressed. ‘In the name of the revolutionary people I declare you under arrest’, he shouted.¹⁹ Rodzyanko, faced with this challenge to his own authority as leader of the Duma committee, backed down helplessly. Two soldiers led away the confused and crestfallen old Goremykin to join the others.

Kerensky was everywhere. ‘I was summoned and sent for from all sides. As in a trance, regardless of day or night…I rushed about the Duma. Sometimes I almost lost consciousness for fifteen or twenty minutes until a glass of brandy was forced down my throat and I was made to drink a cup of black coffee.’²⁰

Kerensky would become more and more excitable as the hours and days passed. Nabokov, seeing him for the first time, was struck by his ‘loss of emotional balance’. He was also astonished when Kerensky, coming out of one meeting ‘excited, agitated, hysterical,’ put up his hands, grabbed the corners of his wing collar, and ripped them off,’ achieving a deliberately proletarian look, instead of that of a dandy’.²¹

His power, nevertheless, was enormous for there was no doubting among the Duma deputies that the new Soviet, with a thousand members milling around the Tauride Palace, was master if it chose to be. Kerensky was the bridge between two rivals in an uneasy coalition, and for the Duma members he was a bridge they could not afford to cross. The Temporary Committee of the Duma had the better claim to government, but its members knew that in this revolution they could only lead where Kerensky was willing to follow.

TRAPPED in Millionnaya Street, Michael knew little that day of events in the world aside. After a few restless hours on a settee, he was awakened by ‘the noise of heavy traffic and movement of cars and lorries filled with soldiers who were shooting mainly in the air and there were also explosions of hand-grenades. The soldiers shouted and cheered, waved red flags and had red ribbons and bows on their breasts and buttonholes’.²²

Peering cautiously out from the apartment windows, Michael guessed from the jubilation of the troops driving by that there was no longer any resistance in the capital. There had been fierce fighting that morning around the Admiralty building until the last of the loyal troops, holed up there since the evacuation of the Winter Palace at 5 a.m., surrendered after warnings that the guns of the St Peter and St Paul Fortress would be turned on them.²³ Thereafter the streets belonged to the revolution and the head-hunting gangs seeking out policemen, and anyone deemed ‘a traitor’ to the revolution.

One target was Grand Duke Andrew’s mistress Kschessinska. In the depths of winter, when the fuel depots were empty and people freezing in their homes, four military lorries, laden with sacks of coal, had arrived at her mansion on Kammenny-Ostrov Prospekt.²⁴ To the mob, she was not an admired ballet star but the pampered recipient of blatant imperial favours, and a profiteer in arms deals. A vengeful crowd therefore descended on her house and sacked it from top to bottom. Kschessinska, forewarned, fled the house just in time, dressed like a peasant and with a shawl over her head, but not before remembering to pack a small suitcase with the most valuable of her jewels.²⁵

At the nearby Astoria Hotel, a mob stormed in, after claiming that shots had been fired from there, and wrecked it. British and French officers staying there — military observers attached to the Russian army — were left alone, and indeed one was astonished to find himself being saluted as rebel troops ran up the staircase in search of Russians hiding in their rooms. Many of these, women as well as men, were dragged away as ‘prisoners of the revolution’, their fate uncertain.²⁶

For Michael it was galling to think what might have been, if his brother had given him the free hand he had requested. Now there was no authority, no rallying point for those who would have welcomed the chance to turn the tables on the lawless mob rampaging throughout the capital. Where was the relief force so confidently promised by Nicholas? There was no sign among the celebrating rebels that they feared their arrival, and since the telephones were not working Michael could not contact anyone to find out what had happened to them. There was therefore nothing to do but sit tight and wait out the day. Fortunately their luck held. The bands searching the city for prisoners, not knowing that Michael was in 12 Millionnaya Street, left the building alone. ‘The day passed peacefully and no one bothered us’, he wrote that evening in his diary.²⁷

Next morning, Wednesday March 1, there was cause for alarm when a squad of uniformed men broke into the apartment above, the home of the Procurator of the Holy Synod, and dragged him away shouting that he was ‘under arrest’. In the house next door, an old general, Baron Staekelberg, defended his home for hours against a gang of soldiers and sailors, and when they broke in they lynched his servant and killed the general, hauling his body to the Neva and throwing it in.²⁸

Fortunately, local telephone lines in central Petrograd began to be restored during that morning and at last Michael was able to call out. Johnson spoke to Rodzyanko and told him where they were. An armed guard of five officers and 20 cadet officers was swiftly organised and despatched to Millionnaya Street as protection. By noon the apartment was secured, the armed sentries at the doors explaining themselves to any roving bands passing by that they were ‘acting on the orders of the Temporary Committee of the Duma’.²⁹ The officers and cadets were housed in the study and in the empty flat below; with their arrival the building was thereafter left untouched.

With that, Michael was back in business. He had scribbled a note to Natasha that ‘our brains are wide-awake and the order of the day is to find a way of contacting representatives where we are renting an estate’ — a reference to their English property and thus code for the British ambassador Buchanan.³⁰

As visitors now began to arrive, a courier was found to get that message to a fretting Natasha so that she would know where he was. Among those who sped to Millionnaya Street was a lawyer, Nikolai Ivanov, an aide of Rodzyanko, who brought with him an ‘imperial manifesto’ which he wanted Michael to sign. This promised a constitutional monarchy as soon as the war ended, and immediate recall of the Duma and the formation of a government ‘that enjoys the trust of the country’.³¹ The busy Ivanov had already secured the signatures of Grand Dukes Paul and Kirill, and in so doing Rodzyanko hoped that it would also prove to be to his personal advantage, with he, and not Prince Lvov, emerging as prime minister.

The manifesto, drafted by Rodzyanko and Ivanov, was to be credited to Paul; he had already shown it to Alexandra, though predictably she had greeted it with her usual scorn. ‘Paul has worked out some idiotical manifesto about a constitution after the war,’ she wrote to Nicholas, in a letter, which would reach him when it no longer mattered.³² Nevertheless, to Rodzyanko it appeared to offer one last chance to seize back the initiative, as he canvassed supporting signatories. If this was endorsed by the family — a Grand Duke’s manifesto — it might well persuade even Nicholas that he no option other than to sign it.

Michael agreed to add his name. It met the immediate necessity of a new start under a new style of government, and if the family were to unite behind that, then it might offer hope of some last-minute reprieve for his brother. Expecting Nicholas to be back in Tsarskoe Selo that evening, and the promised arrival of his relief force, Michael was determined to meet him and plead yet again for a new start for Russia. A Grand Duke’s manifesto could only help his arguments. Looking on the bright side, he wrote to Natasha to say that if Nicholas did accept it, ‘Russia’s new existence will begin’.³³

That afternoon the British ambassador Buchanan turned up at the apartment, and agreed that the new manifesto might just save Nicholas’s throne. Michael told him that he had ‘repeatedly urged the Emperor to grant reforms, but in vain, and that he greatly regretted that Nicholas ‘had not done spontaneously what he would now have to do by force.’³⁴

Buchanan, knowing that Michael was planning to see Nicholas that night in Tsarskoe Selo — but equally unaware that the Tsar was now heading in the opposite direction, to Pskov— asked him ‘to beseech the Emperor, in the name of King George, to sign the manifesto, to show himself to his people and to effect a complete reconciliation with them’. Michael agreed to press his brother to do so.³⁵

Yet quite how Michael was to get to Tsarskoe Selo, with the mobs in control of the streets, was another matter. However, both assumed that Rodzyanko could provide the necessary security and that the Duma men in the Tauride Palace had more control than they actually possessed. Rodzyanko had said as much, for unless Michael did hand over the manifesto to Nicholas, it was not worth the paper it was written on — as almost immediately would prove to be the case.

The blame for that would fall in large part on the ambitious Grand Duke Kirill who had signed the manifesto the day before. For at the very moment that Michael was putting his name to the document, Kirill effectively tore it up — marching into the Tauride Palace at the head of a battalion of his marines, a big red bow on his chest, to ‘declare his loyalty to the Temporary Duma Committee’.³⁶ His marines guarding Tsarskoe Selo would also be withdrawn on his orders.

Kirill, like Michael and every other Grand Duke, had sworn an oath of loyalty to ‘serve His Imperial Majesty, not sparing my life and limb, until the very last drop of my blood’; now, on Wednesday, March 1, he joined the revolution, whilst Nicholas was still Tsar. Paléologue, driving later past Kirill’s palace on Glinka Street, would see a red flag flying on its roof.³⁷

One of those who saw Kirill’s arrival at the Tauride Palace was General Polovtsov, once commander of the Tartar regiment in Michael’s Savage Division, and someone who continued to respect him. In Petrograd by chance, he had been recruited by Guchkov to serve on the Duma’s ‘military committee’. To his eyes, the arrival of Kirill ‘made a great impression and was understood by the crowd as a sign that the imperial family refused to fight for its rights and recognised the revolution as an accomplished fact’. The monarchists in the Duma ‘did not like it.’ ³⁸

Kirill’s later justification for his actions was that the Duma Committee was the only effective authority in the capital, and because it had ordered all units in the capital to report to it ‘to show its allegiance’, he had no alternative as a commander of one of those units but to obey.

‘They were the only loyal and reliable troops left in the capital…to have deprived them of leadership would simply have added to the disaster.’ His concern, he protested, ‘was to do my utmost to re-establish order in the capital…so that the Emperor could safely return.’³⁹ Few believed that, either then or on reading his subsequent apologia, which he boldly entitled My Life in Russia’s Service.

Kirill’s hostility to Tsarskoe Selo was well known, as were his own ambitions. However much he protested his innocence, he was bound to be suspected of having gone to the Duma in the hope of ingratiating himself, and with Nicholas gone, it would be the ‘loyal’ Kirill who would be asked to become Regent, even Emperor. Unfortunately for Kirill, as the Duma Committee came to see Nicholas’s abdication as the only hope of saving the monarchy — and as the price of a deal with the Soviet — the only man being talked about as Regent was Michael. Kirill had spent his reputation for nothing.

Understandably, he was therefore outraged, as was uncle Grand Duke Paul, that Michael should have emerged as the hope for salvation. Paul suspected that it was all the work of the scheming Natasha and her left-wing friends in the Duma. As he wrote to Kirill: ‘the new intention to make Misha Regent displeases me greatly. It is inadmissible and it is possible that it may be merely the intrigues of Brasova…if Nicky agrees the manifesto which we have sanctioned…the demands of the people will have been satisfied.’⁴⁰

Kirill replied immediately in similar cloud-cuckoo terms: ‘I completely agree,’ he wrote furiously. ‘But despite my entreaty to work together and in conformity with the family, Misha sneaks away and communicates secretly with Rodzyanko,’ he wailed. ‘I have been left completely alone during these days to bear responsibility towards Nicky and to save the situation while recognising the new government.’⁴¹

Kirill’s petulant response was understandable: his march into the Tauride Palace had gained him nothing but odium. As for Paul, his manifesto was already dead even as he was advancing its merits. It had been vetoed by the Soviet and as that became clear it ceased to matter, and was put away in a drawer.

Simply too little, too late? Ironically, Nicholas would still think it was too much, too soon. In any case, what the family wanted did not matter to him and it would not be they who would dictate what was to come. As for Alexandra, it had taken just five days, but her hated ministers were now under arrest, her despised government was no more, and her humiliated husband lost in a train. Her downfall, the prospect of which had occupied the minds of so many for so long, was already complete. What she thought and said was no longer of any consequence and never would be again.

AT about seven o’ clock that Wednesday evening, after travelling 860 miles, Nicholas’s train crawled into Pskov station, and he was at last back in contact with the world, albeit one very different to that he had left 38 hours earlier, at 5 a.m. the previous day. There was no one to meet him, though shortly afterwards the 63-year-old army commander, General Nikolai Ruzsky, turned up at the station, ‘bent, grey and old, wearing galoshes,’ his eyes behind his spectacles ‘unfriendly’.⁴²

Sitting in the Tsar’s study aboard the train, Ruzsky was uncomfortable about discussing constitutional issues, but he was convinced of the need for concessions of the kind which Michael had argued for, and he pressed on doggedly to say so. There was a gloomy dinner, then the talks resumed.

Nicholas thought Ruzsky rude and the general would later admit that ‘we had a storm brewing’.⁴³ As stubborn as ever and still blind to his own peril, Nicholas refused to give up his autocratic powers, though he conceded that he was willing to appoint Rodzyanko as prime minister, albeit with a Cabinet responsible to the Tsar.

Ruzsky was getting nowhere, until a telegram arrived from General Alekseev at Mogilev, urging the same concessions. Nicholas, now in an uncomfortable corner, sought compromise. He insisted that, whatever else, the ministers for war, navy and foreign affairs should continue to be accountable to him. Ruzsky would not even concede that: all ministers, he argued, should be accountable to the Duma.

Nicholas went to his sleeping car a rattled man. In refusing the demands of politicians and dismissing the pleas of his brother and others, he had assumed the absolute loyalty of his senior military commanders. Now they, too, seemed to be against him. At 2 a.m. he called Ruzsky to his carriage and told him that he had ‘decided to compromise’; a manifesto granting a responsible minister, already signed, was on the table.⁴⁴ Ruzsky was authorised to notify Rodzyanko that he could now be prime minister of a parliamentary government.

However, that proved only how little the Tsar knew of what had happened in the capital since Michael had wired him at 10.30 p.m. on Monday night, a little more 48 hours earlier. When, at 3.30 a.m. Ruzsky got through to Petrograd on the direct line, Rodzyanko’s reply was shatteringly frank: ‘It is obvious that neither His Majesty nor you realise what is going on here… Unfortunately the manifesto has come too late… and there is no return to the past… everywhere troops are siding with the Duma and the people, and the threatening demands for an abdication in favour of the son, with Michael Aleksandrovich as Regent, are becoming quite definite.’⁴⁵

When Ruzsky finished his long and painfully slow discussion on the direct wire, the time was 7.30 a.m. on Thursday March 2. Before the day was out, Nicholas would abdicate not once, but twice.