The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

13. ‘A FATHER’S FEELINGS’

ALEKSANDR Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin, the two delegates sent to Pskov by the Duma Committee, now the Provisional Government, set off from Petrograd before news reached the capital that Nicholas had offered to abdicate— and therefore, in the minds of all those who heard of it, had abdicated.

Before setting off, and as the talks with the Soviet dragged on, Guchkov had set down the need for decisive action, regardless of any agreement with the Soviet:

In this chaos, in everything that goes on, the first thought should be to save the monarchy. Without the monarchy Russia cannot live. But apparently the present Emperor can no longer reign. An imperial order by him is no longer an order: it would not be executed. And if that is so, then how can we calmly and indifferently await the moment when all the revolutionary riffraff starts to look for an issue itself? They would destroy the monarchy… If we act following an agreement ‘with them’ it will surely turn out to be least favourable to us…¹

Given this, Guchkov and Shulgin still thought that when they did arrive in Pskov, 170 miles away, their task would be to persuade Nicholas to abdicate. They expected a struggle.

The journey took them seven hours, so it was around 10 p.m. when their train pulled into the station and they were led across the tracks to the brightly-lit imperial carriages. Shown into a large saloon car, with a table set with hors d’oeuvres, they were met by the bent figure of old Baron Fredericks, the Tsar’s long-time minister of court and keeper of the family’s secrets.

Shulgin suddenly felt uncomfortable, conscious that he was ‘unshaved, with a crumpled collar, in a business coat.’² Then Nicholas came in, wearing a grey Circassian coat, his face calm. He gestured and the two delegates sat down.

For Guchkov it was an extraordinary moment: for months he had been planning a coup in which Nicholas would be arrested on his train and made to abdicate. In Guchkov’s mind he had pictured a scene not unlike the very one of which he was now part. It would have been two weeks later and there would have been no revolution, but otherwise there were uncanny resemblances between fact and ambition.

Yet Guchkov found himself curiously disconcerted as he faced Nicholas. He shook hands with him and sat down facing him across the polished tabletop. The Emperor — or past Emperor as he was now thought back in Petrograd — was sitting and leaning slightly back against the silken wall, his face blank and impenetrable. Guchkov, recovering his own composure, put his hand on his forehead as was his habit when speaking, and began his case, looking down rather than at Nicholas.³

As he did so, Ruzsky came in, bowed to Nicholas, and whispered to Shulgin to tell him ‘that the matter has been decided’. However, he said nothing to Guchkov, who continued talking until he had finished what he had come here to say.

Expecting an argument he was astonished when Nicholas calmly replied: ‘I have made the decision to abdicate the throne’.⁴ Guchkov glanced at Shulgin. On the journey to Pskov he had rehearsed what he would say, making notes, and working out with Shulgin how best to counter Nicholas’s rebuttal of their arguments. They expected a long night. Now, suddenly, it was all over.

The shock, in fact, was still to come. For after a pause Nicholas announced that he was abdicating not only for himself but for his son, and that he had therefore decided to name Michael as his successor.

Bewildered, Guchkov stared in disbelief. ‘But we had counted on the figure of the little Alexis Nikolaevich as having a softening effect on the transfer of power.’⁵ Replacing Nicholas with an innocent boy was the bedrock of their case for preserving the monarchy against those demanding a republic.

So why? Nicholas looked across the table. ‘I have come to the conclusion that, in the light of his illness, I should abdicate in my name and his name simultaneously, as I cannot be separated from him.’

He leaned forward to Guchkov, as if seeking understanding. ‘I hope you will understand the feelings of a father.’⁶

Fortunately for Nicholas — unfortunately for Russia — Guchkov still did not know of the earlier abdication cable, when Nicholas declared himself ready to abdicate provided that his son ‘can stay with me until he comes of age’, for had he done so he would have arrived in Pskov with a very different purpose. He would not have wasted his time in arguing for abdication, but rather concentrated on agreeing the terms under which Alexis, the new emperor, would remain in parental care for the next three years.

Nicholas could not abdicate twice. His first was binding on him— Ruzsky had a signed copy of that — and acceptance by the Duma Committee of some reasonable arrangement for Alexis’s care would suffice to dispose of any conditional element in his abdication. The principle that an offer once made cannot be withdrawn if its condition is met would have been sufficient for Guchkov to have refused to consider the removal of Alexis from the succession. His difficulty was that he did not know that there had been an offer. And Ruzsky, knowing nothing of the political significance of the issue in terms of the struggle going on at the Tauride Palace, chose to remain silent about it.

However, the fact was that while waiting for the two delegates from Pskov, Nicholas had started to brood about giving up his throne but losing his son at the same time — a prospect which he pondered in dismay. The thought of his beloved son torn from his family and handed over to strangers was too terrible to contemplate, though it was probably no better to think that he might be handed over to ‘Uncle Misha’ as Regent and ‘that woman’. A cynical view might well be that he also bitterly resolved that if ‘they don’t want me, then they won’t get my son’, but whatever was going through his tortured mind, he failed to recognise that what he was proposing was actually unlawful. The laws of succession drawn up and binding since the days of Tsar Paul I were designed to remove the right of one Emperor to choose or block the next.

Tsar Paul had good reason for introducing the law: his own mother, Catherine the Great, had intended to hand her throne to a grandson, not Paul, but died before that could be done. Previous sovereigns had also played fast and loose with the succession. No longer. Succession was to be by rank, not preference, and that was the law followed by the five emperors after Paul. There were to be no more palace coups.

This did not mean that an imbecile could demand the throne, for it was understood that someone clearly unfit to take the throne should not do so; however in ruling out such an heir there were independent procedures by which this should be shown to be in the interests of the nation, not merely an excuse based on the personal judgement of an Emperor.

Was Alexis unfit to become Emperor? The answer was No. Indeed, his parents had spent years hiding his illness from public knowledge so that when he did ascend the throne it would not be held against him. The issue here, never considered before, was separation. And that, in itself — while personally heart-breaking for his family — was not cause for ruling him out. After all, his brother as Regent was hardly likely to countenance such a course for his ailing nephew, and there had been no suggestion in the meetings at the Tauride Palace that removal of Alexis from his parents had been a condition of his inheritance.

Nevertheless that is what Nicholas in that afternoon of Thursday, March 2, decided would be the case, recklessly indifferent to the consequences for crown and country. To find excuse for his change of mind he called Professor Sergei Fedorov, the court physician to his carriage. Fedorov had always told him that Alexis’s haemophilia was incurable, and he repeated that fact now. But that was not what Nicholas wanted to know: his question was whether he thought Alexis would be allowed to remain with the family after his succession. The correct answer to that was surely that Fedorov could not know: he was not a politician, he was a doctor. Instead, probably because he knew what answer Nicholas was looking for, he told him that he doubted if Alexis would be allowed to remain with his parents.⁷ Where he could be more certain was that if separated, Alexis might not get the care he needed, given that his illness had been hidden from the world.

With that, Nicholas had the confirmation he needed to decide that he had sufficient cause for removing Alexis from the succession — contrary to the Fundamental Laws which bound all emperors. No one had a copy of these at Pskov but nevertheless Guchkov and Shulgin recognised the problem they faced, and retired to discuss it all with Ruzsky and his generals. Could an emperor change the laws of succession laid down in the past? After all, Nicholas was an autocrat and what one Tsar ordained perhaps another could set aside, a view which it seemed Nicholas had adopted. None of them could say with certainty that he was wrong.

Someone wondered if Michael’s marriage to a commoner was a problem? They had no idea, but there was mention that Alexander II had married a commoner, though he was already then Emperor and she was his second wife.⁸

As the minutes ticked by the group came to the view that they had no choice but to accept the manifesto as it stood. Every hour counted and neither Guchkov nor Shulgin relished the idea of returning empty-handed to Petrograd, of lamely going back to the Duma to discuss whether a double abdication was acceptable. As things stood they reckoned they had no choice: they would have to accept Alexis being bypassed, and Michael as Emperor. Filing back into the saloon they told Nicholas that they had agreed to his terms.

An abdication manifesto had been drafted earlier at Stavka and wired down to Pskov and it was this which Nicholas took into his study for amendment and signature. The original text drafted at Mogilev had been elegantly written, and the changes made by Nicholas in no way diminished the style. Beginning with a declaration about the need to continue the war ‘to a victorious end’ and ‘the duty to draw Our people into a close union,’ the remaining text, with the removal of Alexis, now read:

We have judged it right to abdicate the Throne of the Russian state and to lay down the Supreme Power. Not wishing to be parted from Our Beloved Son, We hand over Our Succession to Our Brother Grand Michael Aleksandrovich and Bless Him on his accession to the Throne of the Russian state…In the name of Our Dearly beloved native land, WE call upon all true sons of the Fatherland to fulfil their sacred duty to It by their obedience to the Tsar at this difficult time of national ordeal and to help Him, together with the people’s representatives, to lead the Russian state onto the path of victory, prosperity and glory…’

A sealed copy of the abdication was handed over to Guchkov and another to Ruzsky for transmission to the army commands and to Petrograd and other key centres, including the garrison headquarters at Tsarskoe Selo.

It was then 11.40 p.m. but it was agreed that the manifesto should be timed as of three o’clock that afternoon — as stated on the draft sent from the Stavka when Nicholas had first decided to abdicate, albeit with Alexis as his successor.

It was also agreed that Nicholas should issue two other edicts, one naming Prince Lvov as prime minister of the new government, — the two delegates knew that had already been decided in Petrograd — and the other reappointing Grand Duke Nicholas in his place as Supreme Commander.

To give them legality, both were antedated to 2 p.m. when he was still Tsar.⁹ It would have been better law if Nicholas had done the same in renouncing his son’s claim to the throne on the grounds of ill-health citing independent medical evidence — the court physician was there to do that — and separating it from his own abdication. That said, it would have been better politics not to have done it at all.

But it was too late for any such comments. Just after midnight, when Guchkov and Shulgin, with their precious signed manifesto, amending the first, headed back to the capital the text of that second manifesto was being broadcast overnight to the world at large.

And with that, Nicholas left Pskov and headed back to Mogilev, the headquarters he had left with such confidence just 44 hours earlier. Throughout the formalities he had given no sign of distress. Guchkov was so astonished by the ‘simple, matter-of-fact way in which the business was concluded that I even wondered whether we were dealing with a normal person’. Even with a person of ‘the most iron control, of well-nigh unequalled self-control, one might have expected some show of emotion…but nothing of the sort’.¹⁰ Others would also remark on his composure. ‘He renounced the throne as simply as if he were turning over command of a cavalry squadron,’ said one of his aides.¹¹

Within himself, however, he was anything but calm. When he set off back to Mogilev, he went to his diary and revealed his private agony: ‘At one o’ clock this morning I left Pskov with a heart that is heavy over what has just happened. All around me there is nothing but treason, cowardice, and deceit!’¹²

As always, everyone was to blame but himself.

AS news reached the Tauride Palace in the early hours of Friday morning that Nicholas had removed both himself and his son from the throne, panic set in amongst the Duma leaders. The deal which they had thought settled with the Soviet had depended in great degree on the continuity of the legal order, and that the new Tsar would be a harmless boy.

Even so, the prospect of Michael as Regent had alarmed the mutineers more than it had frightened the political elements in the Soviet. Milyukov might try to persuade them that he was only ‘a stupid man’, but among the soldiery what was better known about him was that he had earned the two highest awards in the Russian army, and was a noted battlefield commander. They did not need to wonder what he would think about soldiers who killed their own officers. Talk of a general amnesty did little to reassure them when they thought he was to be Regent. When they found out that he was not that, but Emperor, the deal with the Soviets was not likely to survive the day.

When Milyukov had earlier gone to the Catherine Hall and a made a speech about the programme of the new government, before the issue had been finally settled with the Soviet, there had been protests when he announced the intention that Nicholas would be replaced by his son, with Michael as Regent. ‘But that’s the old dynasty’, came cries from the crowd.

‘Yes, gentlemen, that’s the old dynasty, which you may not like and which I may not like, but…we cannot leave unanswered the question of the form of government. We have in mind a constitutional monarchy…but if we stop to quarrel about it now…Russia will drift into civil war, and we shall have a ruined country.’¹³

That evening as word spread that Michael was to be Regent, a frightened Rodzyanko, ‘accompanied by a handful of officers who reeked of alcohol’ came running up to Milyukov. ‘In a quavering voice,’ recalled Milyukov, a shaken Rodzyanko ‘repeated their assertions that after what I had said about the dynasty they could not go back to their units. They demand that I retract what I had said. This I could not do, but on seeing the behaviour of Rodzyanko, who knew that I had spoken not only in my own name but in the name of the Progressive Bloc as a whole, I decided to issue a statement saying that I had expressed only my personal view.’¹⁴

The officers went in fear of retribution, but fear worked two ways and Rodzyanko was certainly one of those who was as scared of the revolution as the revolution was scared of the monarchy. Later, Milyukov would describe him as being in ‘a blue funk’ and this would become a significant factor in the next hours, for Rodzyanko would be the first to crumble when the news came, early in the morning, that Michael had become Emperor.

The Duma Committee as a whole had been willing to back Milyukov when they believed that Alexis would succeed to the throne, for that transfer of power was lawful and more importantly it faced the Soviet with the problem of waging war on a child. Little Alexis could not be compelled to abdicate because he was too young to sign anything, and they could be sure that Michael would never sign such a manifesto on his behalf. Alexis was also likely to attract the sympathy of the sentimental, God-fearing peasant soldiers, wavering between loyalty and rebellion, who so far had stayed in their barracks.

As written, the manifesto removed that advantage; furthermore it created confusion in the ranks of those who had been prepared to defend the lawful transfer of power, since in turn that would underpin their own claims to be the lawful government. The authority of the Duma men had been based in great degree on the continuity of the accepted order — and with a stroke of his pen Nicholas had swept that away.

Now it was the Duma men who saw their necks at stake. Fear is infectious and it was fear Rodzyanko spread through the Duma deputies and into the new government. No one was anxious to admit that, of course, and instead they thought up better reasons for their change of heart.

One easy excuse was Michael’s morganatic marriage to a woman ‘well known for her political intrigues’; another was that ‘he had never been interested in affairs of state’ — though that could hardly matter, given that it might be held an advantage in a constitutional monarchy where the Emperor was required not to interfere.

Even the republican Kerensky recognised them ‘as irrelevant arguments’¹⁵; the real issue for the new government was whether it stood by the monarchy or caved into the Soviet. The test was courage, and there was not much of that about in those early hours.

Milyukov was one of the few who did not lose his head, arguing that ‘what mattered was not who should be Tsar, but that there should be a Tsar’.¹⁶ However, their nerves rattled by Rodzyanko, the abdication manifesto was seized upon as excuse for abandoning the very case which the Duma Committee had argued so strenuously with the Soviet. Kerensky, hearing his own case being made for him, thought that ‘the decision of Nicholas II had really cut the Gordian knot.’ Everyone on his side of the political divide ‘felt with great relief that once the lawful and rightful succession had been broken, the immediate question of the dynasty had been settled’.¹⁷ Nicholas had done for the Soviet what the Soviet did not dare to do on its own.

But that was later when all was known. The immediate imperative for the Duma men was to keep the manifesto secret until they had time to think what to do for the best. Could publication of the manifesto itself be stopped before it was too late? Rodzyanko was among those who desperately hoped so, and he drove off to the war ministry to wire Pskov and ask Ruzsky to hold up general distribution of it. It was 5 a.m. when Rodzyanko’s tape, its own testimony to his blind panic, stuttered over the direct wire.

It is extremely important that the manifesto… should not be published until I advise you of it… it is with great difficulty that we managed to restraint the revolutionary movement with more or less bearable limits, but the situation is as yet far from settled and civil war is quite possible. Perhaps they would reconcile themselves to the Regency of the Grand Duke… but his accession as Emperor would be completely unacceptable… A mutiny of soldiers has flared up, the like of which I have not seen… little by little the troops were brought to order during the night, but the proclamation of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich would pour oil onto the fire and a merciless extermination of everything that can be exterminated would start…¹⁸

An hour later he was sending the same message to Alekseev at Stavka. Alekseev, who had already sent out the abdication manifesto, was disturbed by his wire conversation with Rodzyanko, and at 7 a.m. he sent out his views to his other army commanders that ‘there is no frankness or sincerity in the communications of Rodzyanko’ and that ‘there is no unity within the State Duma and the Temporary Committee’.¹⁹

Alekseev suspected that it was the Soviet which was dictating affairs in the capital. His response was to propose that the army should demand that the manifesto as written be implemented and that there should be a meeting of all army commanders to ‘establish unanimity in all circumstances and in any eventuality’.

At the Tauride Palace, the new government knew that it could not delay much longer its meeting with Michael — whether he was Emperor or whether they could somehow return him to Regent. Everyone knew where he was. As they waited for Rodzyanko to return from his wire talks, Kerensky picked up a copy of the Petrograd telephone directory, flicked through the pages and ran his finger down the column to the name of Princess Putyatina. Her number was 1-58-48. A few moments later, at 5.55 a.m., the telephone rang in 12 Millionnaya Street.²⁰