The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

1. LOVE AND DUTY

FOR Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich, younger brother of Tsar Nicholas II, the only place he would ever think of as his real home was the little garrison town of Gatchina, 29 miles north-west of St Petersburg. Although born in the Anichkov Palace on the Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg on November 22, 1878, it was the immense, 600-roomed palace at Gatchina where he had been brought up, and he would ever think of that and its parks and adjoining town as the place where he belonged and to which he would always want to return.

He was just three years old when his father, Alexander III, retreated there with his Danish-born wife Marie and their five children after the assassination of his 63-year-old grandfather Alexander II, ambushed by terrorists on his way back to the Winter Palace on Sunday March 1, 1881.

The bomb, thrown at his feet as he climbed down from his carriage to inspect the wounded from another bomb thrown a few minutes earlier, almost ripped him apart — his right leg torn away, his left leg shattered, his stomach, chest and face mutilated. He remained conscious only long enough to moan, ‘back to the palace… to die there.’¹ There was nothing anyone could do for him after they carried his mangled body into his first-floor study at the palace; forty-five minutes later his eldest son, standing grimly at the window, was the new Tsar.

Alexander II, dubbed the ‘Tsar-Liberator’ because he had freed the peasants from serfdom, had that very morning signed a new constitutional order which would have introduced a measure of representative government into Russia; his murder ensured that the order died with him. His massively-built son was not the kind of man to offer concessions to the terrorists who threatened to kill him as they had killed his father. However, Russia could not afford to lose two Tsars in a row and Alexander III, furious that ‘I must retreat now before those skunks’,² took himself and his family off to the security of Gatchina. It was the only retreat he would make. Once there, he stamped down hard on the anarchists, terrorists and revolutionaries who thought they could overthrow the Romanovs.

Thirty-six when he became Tsar, Alexander III did not claim to know what was best for liberal Britain, republican France, or the new thrusting German empire fashioned by Bismarck, but he thought he knew what was best for Russia: not muddle-headed constitutional government but the stern hand of a loving father. Under this Alexander, the country would begin to catch up with the industrialised West, the huge bureaucratic machine would begin to tick over more smoothly, and Russian prosperity would increase as never before.

Favouring peasant dress of blouse and boots, and wearing patched shirts,³ Alexander had barked the orders in Gatchina which had transmitted his rule from the Baltic to the Pacific, and in so doing he had made Russia respected in every chancellery in Europe and beyond. An intimidating figure, standing six feet four inches tall, his physical strength was as awesome as it was legendary.

When, in the middle of a Balkan crisis, the Austrian ambassador was rash enough to hint at a state dinner that his country might mobilise two or three army corps, the Tsar’s reaction was to pick up a silver fork, bend it into a knot, and toss it contemptuously in the direction of a now discomfited ambassador. ‘That’, said Alexander, ‘is what I am going to do to your two or three army corps.’⁴ However, after only thirteen years as Tsar, and at the age of only forty-nine, Alexander fell ill, and although his doctors believed that all he needed was a long rest and reviving sunshine, his condition rapidly deteriorated. He was suffering from a kidney complaint which, long undiagnosed, had developed into nephritis. On October 20, 1894, he died at his holiday home at Livadia, in the Crimea, and at the age of twenty-six his son Nicholas became Emperor in his place.

At the moment he found himself Tsar, Nicholas had cried out: ‘What am I going to do… I am not prepared to be a Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling…’⁵

But help was at hand. One of those present in the death-chamber at Livadia was his 22-year-old fiancée of six months, Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. Unable to speak a word of Russian, she had watched the bustle of the past days in silence. However, she became increasingly dismayed that her husband-to-be seemed to be ignored entirely by the crush around the dying Tsar’s bed. So she went to his study, opened his diary, and penned a note to him in English which would be the first of many such notes to come. ‘Be firm and make the doctors come to you every day and tell you how they find him… so that you are always the first to know. Don’t let others be put first and you left out…Show your own mind and don’t let others forget who you are.’⁶

It was the message she would still be sending him twenty-three years later as their world collapsed around them.

MICHAEL was not quite sixteen when his father died and it marked the end of his childhood as it marked the end of an era for Russia. Three months earlier his elder sister Xenia had married a second cousin, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich — known in the family as ‘Sandro’ — and one week after his father’s funeral in November 1894 his brother Nicholas married Princess Alix, now to be styled the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna. His other brother George, two years his senior and suffering from tuberculosis, was living in the high air of the Caucasus in the hope that it would save his life. His distracted mother, now the Dowager Empress, and trying to come to terms with the loss of her husband, moved back to the Anichkov Palace, taking with her Michael and his younger sister Olga, aged twelve. The new emperor Nicholas would make his family home in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles north of the capital, and reign from there not the Winter Palace, which after the assassination of Alexander II was used only for ceremonial and official purposes. With that, Gatchina palace become a place visited only occasionally until seven years later when Michael found himself back there as a soldier, and able to make it his home again.

For a young Grand Duke there were few choices when it came to a career, so Michael at eighteen followed the traditional path into the military. In the army he found himself for the first time among young men of his own age, free to make friendships of his own choosing, and to follow his own pursuits — and certainly, in sporting terms, more than able to compete with his fellow officers. Standing well over six feet tall — his brother Nicholas was barely five foot seven — he swiftly became a crack shot, a skilled swordsman, and so excellent a rider he won prizes steeplechasing.

After a spell at artillery school he first joined the Horse Guards Artillery, serving with them until June 1902 when, aged twenty-three, he was transferred to the élite Guards cavalry regiment, the Blue Cuirassiers, garrisoned in Gatchina, and of which his mother was colonel-in-chief.⁷ Michael, who took his soldiering seriously, was appointed a squadron commander. With that he moved back into his old apartment.

Gatchina palace, designed by the celebrated Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi, was deliberately unlike any of the other Romanov palaces in and around St Petersburg. Commissioned by Grigory Orlov, Catherine the Great’s lover, who had been given Gatchina as reward for helping her to depose and then dispose of her husband Peter III — strangled in 1762 to clear the way for her seizing his throne — it was built in mellowed limestone in what the Russians regarded as the ‘English style’. This meant it was on austere, simple lines, with walls left in natural stone colour rather than painted yellow, blue, or Venetian red as was the case with the other more classically-styled Romanov palaces. Surrounded by a drawbridged moat, it was said by its detractors to look more like a barracks than a royal palace, though that was one good reason for Alexander III going there. No terrorist would ever breach its security, though that may have been because no terrorist ever thought there was any chance of doing so.

Alexander III had housed his family not in the palace itself but in the adjoining quadrangle, known as the Arsenal, a place originally intended for staff, not their masters. Michael’s three-roomed apartment there was off the vaulted, low-ceilinged corridor on the mezzanine floor of the three-storey building. He had a bedroom with a single brass bed, a sitting room furnished with button-backed sofa and armchairs, a study with a desk and mahogany desk-chair, and a bathroom with a tin bath, albeit linked to hot-and-cold running water, and shelves filled with his shaving tackle and pomades.

The rooms were cluttered, as all rooms were in the style of the day, with the walls covered in family photographs and military prints. In the display cabinet in his sitting room there were sets of painted lead soldiers as well as his collection of crystal ornaments, and throughout the suite, on side tables and chairs, there could be found the bric-a-brac to be expected in any apartment occupied by a well-off but not overly fussy young bachelor.

What his apartment noticeably did not have was a kitchen. When he wanted something, day or night, he ordered whatever it was from the main palace, still swarming with uniformed servants, many of them in the dress of the eighteenth-century. For even though the palace no longer had a place in the official business of empire, it continued to function as before, with sailors manning boats on the lake, soldiers on guard at the doors, and important functionaries issuing orders to gardeners, footmen, cooks, maids and liveried menservants. Sometimes his mother would return for a week or so and then the palace would bustle around the business of luncheon and dinner parties and in opening shutters on rooms closed for most of the year. But otherwise the vast palace primarily served the needs of those who worked there, the kitchens cooking meals for the staff, not for its imperial master, the maids cleaning rooms which from day-to-day only they would walk through.

Thus, modest though his own private apartments were, Michael needed no more. He could entertain whenever he wished in the main palace, or under the magnificent painted ceilings of the eighteenth-century Pavilion of Venus in the great park outside.

His fellow officers were free to boat on its lakes, stroll in its gardens, take girls for winter sleigh rides, shoot in its woods, and on occasion dance in its ballroom. So although only Michael could call it home, the palace was full of life throughout the year, and a vibrant part of the social world both within the Blue Cuirassiers and the town itself.

Gatchina, founded in 1796, was a graceful place to live. There were houses painted primrose-yellow, standing in large country-style gardens, elegant apartment blocks, imposing public buildings, and two great churches, the Cathedral of St Paul and the Church of the Intercession of Our Lady, which lay at the head of the main boulevard. Although its usual population was only 18,000, in the summer that greatly expanded as the trains from St Petersburg, just an hour away, pulled into the town’s two railway stations and disgorged families, servants, dogs and the mounds of luggage which marked the annual exodus from the capital to the summer dachas in and around Gatchina. There were evening concerts in the palace park, sailing on the two great lakes around the town, and leisurely dinners in the crowded restaurants on the tree-lined boulevards. And always and everywhere the delicious murmur of scandals, real or imagined.

Michael, as the town’s own Grand Duke, was rarely the subject of critical gossip and woe betide anyone from the capital who thought of doing so in earshot of any resident of Gatchina. He was popular, greatly admired, and the Grand Duke whom the town was proud to think of as its own. He was never accompanied by guards or officials or courtiers and he never exhibited any signs of rank. Walking openly through the streets he would stop and cheerfully chat to the locals, patting their children, and often quietly helping those in need — though sometimes he was known to be too trusting for his own good, giving aid where none was deserved.

This approval of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich was echoed well beyond the narrow world of Gatchina itself. His brother-in-law Sandro wrote of him that ‘he fascinated everybody by the wholehearted simplicity of his manner. A favourite with his family, with his fellow officers, and with all his countless friends, he possessed a well-organised mind and would have succeeded in any branch of the service.’⁸

His cousin and close friend, Prince Nicholas of Greece, observed that ‘he was a very keen soldier and a real sportsman; his jovial nature endeared him to all. He was a fine, athletic young man, and went in for physical training, which he practised like a professional gymnast’.⁹

Yet there was much more to him than that. He spoke French and English fluently and was a competent musician on piano, flute, balalaika and guitar, composing several of his own pieces. He enjoyed the theatre, ballet and opera, and was widely-read. In one letter he listed the books he was then reading; they included A History of the French Revolution, a biography of Robespierre, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, as well as a couple of other literary novels.

Polovtsov, a member of the state Council, and head of the Imperial Russian Historical Society, which had published several of Michael’s academic papers on the Napoleonic War,¹⁰ judged that Michael ‘has an extraordinary strong will and once he has taken an aim in his sights he will achieve it without haste, and with undeviating firmness.’¹¹

Sergei Witte, who had been Alexander III’s chief advisor and who twelve years later became Russia’s first prime minister after the convulsions of the 1905 Revolution forced Nicholas to agree to the formation of an elected Duma, or parliament, was another who spoke highly of Michael. He had taught him political science and economics,¹² and he had long made little secret of his view that Michael was to be preferred to Nicholas. One senior courtier observed that Witte ‘never tired of praising his straightforwardness.’¹³ Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich wrote that ‘Witte sees in him a clear mind, an unshakeable conviction in his opinions, and a crystalline moral purity.’¹⁴

Dr E. J. Dillon, the widely-respected correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, quoted Witte as saying that ‘if Alexander III had lived, or if his son Michael had succeeded him or were yet to come to the throne, much might be changed for the better, and Russia’s international position strengthened.’¹⁵

Comments such as this were taken seriously at the time, for in 1899 Michael’s elder brother George had been found dying beside his overturned motorcycle near his home in the Caucasus, and with that Michael, still only twenty, had become heir to the throne, for although Nicholas had daughters he had as yet no son to succeed him.

In eighteenth-century Russia there had been empresses reigning in their own right — the widow of Peter the Great, his daughter Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great — but after Paul I succeeded his mother, whom he hated, he ruled that henceforth no woman was eligible to take the crown; that law had been accepted as binding ever since.

Six weeks before Michael found himself heir, Alexandra had been delivered of her third child, Marie, and after that it was noticed that Nicholas ‘set off on a long solitary walk’, although when he came back he seemed as ‘outwardly unruffled as ever.’¹⁶ Obsessed with her need to produce a male heir, Alexandra quickly became pregnant again in the autumn of 1900, though it seemed that it might be too late, for Nicholas had fallen gravely ill on holiday in the Crimea and there were fears that he might die. He had intestinal typhus, a disease which in those days often proved fatal. In that event, Michael would automatically succeed his brother as Emperor.

Alexandra refused to accept that, insisting to gathering ministers that even if Nicholas died, the posthumously-born child, if a boy, should be declared Tsar and that in the meantime she should rule Russia as Regent on behalf of her womb. The ailing Nicholas ‘sided with his wife’. Court minister Baron Fredericks reported that Nicholas thought Michael ‘will get everything into a mess — he is so easily imposed upon.’¹⁷ Witte strongly disagreed. At an impromptu conference of ministers in a Yalta hotel he ‘succeeded in winning over to my side all the members of the improvised conference. It was decided that in the event of the Emperor’s death we should immediately take an oath of allegiance to Michael Aleksandrovich.’¹⁸

Witte, dismissed as prime minister in 1906, dated his becoming ‘the object of Alexandra’s particular enmity’ from his stand at Yalta, which she interpreted as ‘an underhand intrigue on my part against her.’¹⁹ As it happened, it was all for nothing anyway: the Tsar recovered and when Alexandra did give birth to her fourth child, it was another girl, Anastasia. It would not be for another four years — in August 1904 — that Alexandra finally and triumphantly produced the long-awaited son and heir, named Alexis. Tragically, he would be found to be suffering from the ‘bleeding disease’ haemophilia, with any bump or bruise a threat to his life.

Six months earlier, in Germany, her sister Irene, married to the Kaiser’s brother Prince Henry, had lost her own haemophilic son to the ‘terrible illness of the English family’; years earlier, Alexandra’s own little brother had also died after he fell and bumped his head in Darmstadt. The threat was clear and terrible: Alexis’s chances of surviving childhood, or even living long into manhood, were not great.

However, that Alexis was so inflicted was not immediately apparent and in the manifesto produced on his birth Nicholas declared that in the event of his own death before Alexis was old enough to reign in his own right — 1920 — Michael was appointed Regent. Characteristically, Alexandra succeeded in adding her name as co-Regent, meaning that she and Michael would rule in tandem. With that, Michael had especial reason to pray for his brother’s well-being.

GIVEN that the life of the infant Tsarevich was at constant risk, there were very good reasons why Michael’s mother the Dowager Empress should be anxious that he married the right woman. The immediate imperial family relied upon him to be able to step in, should anything terrible happen, as it could do in those dangerous times. He was the insurance policy for the throne of his father.

There were plenty of other Grand Dukes in the line of succession, to be sure, as descendants of Alexander II or his predecessor Nicholas I, but the Dowager Empress was chiefly interested in keeping the crown in the hands of her late husband’s direct descendants, not passing elsewhere. In her mind, Michael properly married was the best hope of ensuring that future. Moreover, when she looked at the other Romanovs, there were none with the qualities she saw in her son Michael.

The family which ranked immediately behind him was headed by her brother-in-law Vladimir, who for his own reasons had always thought that he would have proved a better Tsar than his elder brother Alexander, though no one else outside his own circle shared his conviction. He had been briefly banished by Alexander after a disgraceful scene in a St Petersburg restaurant, in which he drunkenly tried to throttle a French actor whom he thought had made a pass at his wife²⁰, but in 1908, aged sixty-one, he was the senior Grand Duke after Michael, and stood third-in-line to the throne.

His wife Maria Pavlovna was a German princess from Mecklenberg-Schwerin who had steadfastly refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, notwithstanding the imperial law which made that a condition of marriage to a Romanov. Since they had married in Lutheran Germany, there was nothing the Russian church could do about that, but purists questioned whether in consequence he remained eligible for the throne — and indeed, whether therefore any of his three sons were in turn fit to succeed. A towering figure as huge as his brother Alexander, Vladimir’s answer to that was to smash his fist down and damn the rules. The Romanovs made the law, not the Church, and the priests could go hang.

It was an understandable stance, for fourth in line was his eldest son Kirill, who had broken church law by marrying his first cousin ‘Ducky’. Although it was common enough for royals to marry first cousins in Europe — Queen Victoria married her first cousin — the Russian Orthodox Church prohibited marriages of that kind. Since he had defied the law, Kirill had been banished for that in 1905, though for Empress Alexandra at Tsarskoe Selo his greater crime was that Ducky had divorced Alexandra’s brother Ernst, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, swopping one first cousin for another. That was family rift not church law, though Ducky excused herself by saying that Ernst was a homosexual: ‘no boy was safe, from the stable hands to the kitchen help. He slept quite openly with them all’, she would tell a niece.²¹ Ducky and Alexandra hated each other ever after.

Fifth in line was Kirill’s brother Boris, a year younger than Michael; like Michael he was still unmarried, but unlike Michael he had led a notorious life, frequenting prostitutes as well as being involved in a number of scandalous affairs, including one with Ducky’s sister Marie, the future Queen of Romania. It was an open secret that the father of her daughter was not her husband but Boris — though for the sake of the Romanian crown, that was hushed up and her cuckolded husband acknowledged the baby girl Marie as his.²² It was just as well, since she ultimately became the Queen of Yugoslavia.

Boris was also involved in another scandal when he bedded a young woman in St Petersburg on the eve of her wedding. Sadly for the bride-to-be the bridegroom found out and the wedding was cancelled.²³ Of all the Grand Dukes, Boris could be said to be the one more likely to be shot by a husband than by a terrorist.

Sixth in line was Andrew, Kirill’s youngest brother, who was living contentedly with the prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, seven years his senior. They had an illegitimate son, Vovo — though Vovo himself was never sure whether his father was Andrew, who acknowledged him, or her previous lover Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich.²⁴ However, what was recognised was that Andrew would never give up Kschessinska, and never marry anyone else.

Seventh in line at the beginning of 1908 was Vladimir’s younger brother Alexis. Officially a bachelor, it was widely known that Alexis had secretly married a commoner but whom he subsequently abandoned for a French actress. Sometime in charge of the navy, he was widely blamed for the disasters of the 1904 war with Japan —‘fast women, slow ships’, was the popular comment on him. Such was public scorn that his actress mistress had been booed off stage when she appeared in St Petersburg, and had fled back to Paris; Alexis followed her. In November 1908, aged fifty-eight, he would die there in her arms.²⁵

Eighth in line was Vladimir’s youngest brother Paul, who after the death of his first wife, Princess Alexandra of Greece, had also fled to Paris where he married a divorcée commoner, Olga Pistolkors.²⁶ Olga’s mistake, when his mistress, had been to wear jewels given to Paul’s mother the Empress Marie at a palace ball; the Dowager Empress recognised them, and ordered her out. A crimson-faced Olga crept away and next day left the country. Paul followed her, leaving behind his two young children Dimitri and Marie by his first wife — a niece of the Dowager Empress. With Paul banished because of his marriage, the two children would be brought up firstly by the Tsar’s childless sister-in-law Ella and her husband Serge and then, after Serge’s assassination in Moscow in 1905, at Tsarskoe Selo by Nicholas and Alexandra.

Ninth in line was Paul’s only son Dimitri, and the one bright spot in the line, since he was still at seventeen too young to have blotted his own book — mercifully, no one could then foresee that one day he would be also banished abroad, in his case for murder.

Tenth in line was Nicholas Konstantinovich, a nephew of Alexander II, who had been banished after a scandalous affair with an American actress, Fanny Lear, daughter of an Ohio preacher. Then still too young to have access to his own funds, he had been caught stealing imperial jewellery to fund the affair, and banished to Tashkent. There he had married a policeman’s daughter. Calling himself ‘Nicholas Romanov’ and declaring that he was a republican, he was an unlikely successor.²⁷

In short, there were scant grounds for reassurance when the Dowager Empress looked at those who, other than Michael, might follow him. However, whatever the misdeed, no Tsar had the power to remove any Romanov from the line of succession. What she saw was what they had.

Five years earlier, after his Uncle Paul had vanished abroad with three million roubles and his divorcée mistress, Nicholas had sent a letter to his mother which seemed depressingly prophetic: How painful and distressing it all is and how ashamed one feels for the sake of our family before the world…in the end, I fear, a whole colony of members of the Russian Imperial Family will be established in Paris with their semi-legitimate and illegitimate wives! God alone knows what times we are living in, when undisguised selfishness stifles all feelings of conscience, duty or even ordinary decency’.²⁸

His younger sister Olga would later agree that he was absolutely right about ‘the appalling marital mess in which the last generation of my family involved themselves. That chain of domestic scandals could not but shock the nation but did any of them care for the impression they created? Never.’²⁹

When she pronounced that hypocritical verdict on her family, she was clearly not thinking of herself and her lover Captain Kulikovsky, later her husband after she divorced her first husband, Duke Peter of Oldenburg. But certainly, she had a point. The Romanovs had an awful lot of skeletons in their cupboard

Michael was about to add another.

THE girl whom both his mother and her sister in London, Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII, hoped he would marry was Her Royal Highness Princess Patricia of Connaught. Indeed that seemed to be what was to happen in September 1906 when the British Sunday newspapers announced their engagement. The London Observer was flattering about Michael. ‘Like his bride he is exceedingly fond of horses, and has taken part in a good many officers’ races. He is also adept at boxing, wrestling, riding, dancing, and swimming. He has always enjoyed the reputation of being a stronger character than the Emperor.’³⁰

Like his bride? Within hours of the newspapers landing on British breakfast tables, a flustered Buckingham Palace was issuing denials, prodded by an indignant Connaught family which knew that the reports of a betrothal were wholly baseless.

The source of this non-betrothal lay in Denmark, where the Dowager Empress and her sister Queen Alexandra had as usual holidayed together that summer in the house they jointly owned at Hvidore. Eavesdropping courtiers, listening to their eager talk about Michael’s marital prospects, had somehow translated hope into fact, telling the Reuters agency in St Petersburg that what the sisters intended had already happened. Wisely, the Dowager Empress and Queen Alexandra kept silent, pretending to be as baffled as everyone else.

Two years later, in October 1908, they tried again, sending Michael to London, where the Queen ‘paired’ him off with Princess Patricia for a weekend at the British royal family’s country home at Sandringham, 100 miles from London.³¹ Michael was polite, but disinterested. The only woman he was then interested in — or ever would be again — lived in Gatchina, and was married to a fellow officer in his regiment. Her name was Madame Nathalie Wulfert. Five years later it would be why he would find himself an exile in England.