The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

5. ALEXANDRA THE GREAT

TWO weeks after the Tsar departed Lvov to return home, with heady talk of an advance to Vienna in prospect, Michael also went home. His sector of the front had been quiet, with relatively little action. On April 19, 1915, a German plane dropped five bombs on his headquarters ‘without causing any damage’, there was sporadic firing from the enemy outposts, and ‘we buried a soldier, Veris, killed the day before yesterday’.¹ One dead soldier in two days; given what had gone before that was almost peace. Five days later he was back in Gatchina, his division, after six months in the frontline, being withdrawn for rest and refitting, and that would take at least a month.

That month passed so quickly that afterwards it seemed the briefest of interludes. Michael saw his brother twice at Tsarskoe Selo, and had tea with his mother at the Anichkov Palace. Otherwise he spent his whole time with Natasha. They drove out in his American Packard to have picnics with friends, went to the theatre in the capital, rode in the Gatchina palace park — and then, on May 23, Michael went back to the war. Natasha this time went with him only so far as Brest-Litovsk, a large town and railway junction some 200 miles north of Lvov, now too close to the frontline to be safe.

In the month Michael had been away the war had started to go badly for Russia. Ground won on the south-west front was now ground lost. The Tsar’s victory tour of early April had been followed with a new offensive, master-minded by the Germans, and launched with an overwhelming artillery barrage which tore apart the Russian divisions facing them. Trenches collapsed and reinforcements brought up melted away as the shellfire fell on them.

Many soldiers hastily marched into the battle zone were unarmed and dependent on picking up the weapons of soldiers who had fallen. A month after the offensive began, Przemysl was recaptured and three weeks later, on June 9, 1915, Lvov fell. Caught up in the retreat, Michael’s division withdrew behind the River Dniester, but held its ground thereafter. ‘Oh, how I wish this atrocious slaughter could be over soon’, he wrote home. In two days there were 1,000 casualties.

In the midst of this, on June 6, 1915, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who had died at the age of fifty-seven, was buried with great pomp in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul. The only member of the imperial family absent that day was Michael.

There was critical comment about that which upset Natasha. She wrote to him in bewilderment. ‘Darling Misha, why do you always harm yourself and why didn’t you come for K.K’s funeral. Literally all your relatives came en masse, only you didn’t appear… your absence was conspicuous. Even assuming that you did not feel like showing your face at a family gathering, you could have still taken that opportunity just to come home! Boris (Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich) had only just left and he came back again till June 20.’²

That brought a stinging response from an outraged Michael. I did not come to the funeral of Konstantin K because I had only returned from a long leave a short while before that and did not think I had a right to leave here again; there is a war on, not children’s games with soldiers… while I am in command of a division, it is impossible for me to leave it so often; and if any of my relations do just that, they are wrong and they are not an example for me to follow.³

The desperate fighting apart, there was another reason for his remaining at the frontline, and he tried to explain that, too. ‘Our division is not a regular army unit, and it’s not too easy to command it; there are a lot of different things to sort out — jealousy and rivalry between the regiments, their mutual complaints, etc. When I am here, everything gets into a more peaceful vein, but without me… it is more than difficult to control.’⁴

Natasha, having complained about his absence from the state funeral, was plainly in a bad mood that day, for she added more personal criticism in the same letter. All the officers she saw in the capital, and when her train from the front stopped at Stavka, were smartly dressed, in crisp uniforms, polished boots and with an elegance that fitted well in the Winter Garden Room of the popular Astoria Hotel, which had become her favoured lunching place.

In contrast, Michael, a fighting general, looked shabby, ill-dressed and muddy in almost all the photographs he sent her. ‘Look how awfully you now dress,’ she chided him. ‘Your boots are horrible, you’ve done away with your aiguillettes and instead of the St George you wear a piece of some narrow ribbon…I regret to see you so changed.’⁵

Natasha had sent Michael a St George, made up for her at Fabergé, the imperial jewellers, not understanding that the only person likely to admire the gleam of a Fabergé was an enemy sniper. Personal appearance was not the uppermost consideration in the frontline, or at least in the Savage Division. As if to underline that point, Michael recorded a visit by the Ninth Army general Lechitsky to an artillery position with a large entourage of braided staff officers; it was a target too good to miss and in consequence the general and his staff ‘had to spend two hours crouching in an empty trench’. It was their own fault, said Michael, for he often went to the same position ‘without all that pomp and retinue’ and nothing ever happened.⁶

Someone who was certainly impressed by Michael’s appearance was the American war correspondent Stanley Washburn. When he visited Michael’s headquarters he was surprised to find the brother of the Tsar in ‘a simple uniform with nothing to indicate his rank but shoulder straps of the same material as his uniform, and, barring the St George (won by personal valour on the battlefield) without a decoration…’

What also struck him about Michael was he should find him ‘living so simply in a dirty village in this far fringe of the Russian empire’. He rated Michael highly. ‘He evinced the same stubborn optimism that one finds everywhere in the Russian army’, he commented, ‘while appearing as unaffected and democratic a person as one can well imagine.⁷

Washburn was right — Michael was optimistic, despite everything. ‘I feel so distressed because of Lvov’, he had written to Natasha, but adding that ‘to lose heart and think that we won’t win is just sinful. The morale of the army at the front is good, what I am concerned about is the attitude of the Russian people at large…’⁸

When he wrote that he had good reason to be concerned about the ‘home front’. Serious rioting had broken out in Moscow. The defeats in Galicia resulted in revenge attacks on Germans living in Moscow. Many had been there for generations, owning important businesses, and thinking themselves German only in name.

Natasha went there at the end of June, 1915, and saw for herself what had happened. ‘All that’s left of the shops and houses with German names are just bare walls, with the insides looted and burnt…It was real pillage, just organised and made possible by the indifference and inaction of the authorities and the police…’ One business friend whose home was ransacked ‘told me that members of the intelligentsia were among the rioters — obvious connoisseurs came to his house and chose the best pictures to destroy. So many wonderful paintings lost, such a shame!’⁹

Michael felt ‘very sorry for the unfortunate victims’ and wrote that the pogrom ‘clearly demonstrates the hatred that the Russian people have long felt for foreigners living in Russia…

The government ought to be ashamed that it can’t prevent such things, with many victims as a consequence. How I wish for a ‘wise government’ for my dear Russia, so that we could boast of it to all European states, but who knows if that will ever come, and if it does, I’m afraid it won’t be soon! I know you will understand what I mean, and will read between the lines…

He added that ‘many people now feel that I was right to have married a Russian and not a German…’¹⁰ It was not difficult for Natasha ‘to read between the lines’. His barbs were aimed at Alexandra and her circle.

Although the Savage Division suffered as much as any other as the retreat continued, by mid-July it had been pulled back to a sector which was relatively quiet, and which would remain so over the next few weeks, although on the rest of the front the fighting continued to be intense, as the Russians were pushed further and further back, with horrendous casualties. Michael took the opportunity of going back home for a brief leave — or so he thought.

In fact, having got there he went down immediately with diphtheria, dreaded as one of the great killer diseases of the age, and which he had contracted at the front just before his departure. There were no antibiotics and many sufferers died from asphyxiation as their throats closed up. The minority who survived it took a long time to recover.

Michael proved one of the lucky ones. A week after the first symptoms appeared he began to feel better and by July 30, 1915 he was well enough to have ‘played the guitar a little’.¹¹ Six days later he was strong enough to have got up and gone downstairs for breakfast. That was encouraging, but there was little else to be cheerful about. On August 7 he grimly noted that ‘the war is so bad that I don’t want to write about it.’ Next day he tersely recorded, ‘Kovno and Novo-Georgievsk have been captured!’ Then it was to write that ‘Brest-Litovsk has surrendered. We’ve been in a bad mood for the past few days.’¹²

One reason for these failures, Michael believed, was that Russian strategy was wrong, as events would prove. The war was not about holding or taking territory, he told Natasha, but about destroying the enemy’s army.

What’s happening is that they are trying to achieve the opposite. All high commanders panic over every inch of land captured by the enemy instead of taking a huge fist and punching the enemy where it hurts. This simple and, one would think, reasonable tactic has not so far been used. They want to be strong everywhere, along the entire frontline, which of course is impossible and as a result, we are everywhere equally weak.¹³

Over the past three weeks the advancing Germans had captured Warsaw, then the string of Russian fortresses which in theory should have barred an enemy advance into Russia proper. Millions of shells had been locked up in them, along with hundreds of guns and tens of thousands of men. Now they had all gone with nothing to show for them.

In the first year of the war the Russian army had lost one and a half million men, the equivalent of the whole of its peacetime army; whereas it had been fighting until the spring beyond its own borders, now, for the first time since Napoleon, an enemy was advancing deep inside Russia’s homeland, driving back not only the army but hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding west in flight from homes and crops burned behind them.

Something had to be done and that something was firstly the dismissal of the disastrous war minister Sukhomlinov; he was not only incompetent but corrupt, supporting his high-spending and pretty young wife — at thirty, half his age — with bribes taken from army contracts.

For very different reasons the Supreme Commander, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich — ‘Uncle Nikolasha’ — was to be brought down. The Grand Duke was well regarded by both the British and the French, and by the Germans no less, and his great height and soldierly bearing had impressed foreign correspondents. He was also more victim than villain in the scandal of an army without enough shells, rifles, and boots. Neither the public nor the army sought him as scapegoat. Nevertheless he was removed.

But what shocked Russia, and its allies, was the name of his successor. The new Supreme Commander was to be a man who had never been on the battlefield, and whose last military command had been almost a quarter of a century earlier and then only as an officer in a squadron of the Hussar Life Guards.

The Tsar appointed himself.

Few approved. Michael’s cousin and friend Grand Duke Andrew observed that ‘thoughtful people believe that this step will cause general ill-feeling and discontent and have serious consequences’.¹⁴ The British military observer, Colonel Alfred Knox, who saw the army reaction at first hand, concluded that the misgivings ‘were almost universal’.¹⁵ The French ambassador Paléologue wrote that ‘the news has produced a deplorable impression.’¹⁶ Michael’s commander-in-chief Brusilov judged that Nicholas has ‘struck the last blow against himself’.¹⁷

But if Nicholas was to take himself off to Stavka, then who would represent him in the capital and handle the day-to-day affairs of state? The man who knew nothing about war answered that by appointing someone who knew nothing about politics. He gave the job to his wife.

The move was made almost casually within days of his arrival at headquarters and after a letter from her in which she wrote: ‘Do not fear for what remains behind…don’t laugh at silly old Wify but she has “trousers” on unseen…’¹⁸ His reply was as she had hoped. ‘Think my Wify, will you not come to the assistance of your hubby now that he is absent? What a pity that you have not been fulfilling this duty for a long time, or at least during the war!’¹⁹

The invitation was eagerly accepted. ‘Oh, Sweetheart, I am so touched you want my help. I am always ready to do anything for you, only never liked mixing up without being asked…’²⁰ Since there was no formal announcement that Alexandra was now effectively Regent on the home front, it took some time before the public realised that henceforth Russia was to be ruled by a domineering, neurotic and hysterical Empress and behind her, hiding in her shadow, by the scandalous and hated figure of her hypnotic ‘holy man’, Grigory Rasputin.

THE power of Rasputin had grown massively over the past ten years as again and again he appeared to demonstrate that only he could save Alexandra’s son from the ‘bleeding disease’. When Alexis lay at the point of death in 1912, after injuring himself while jumping into a boat, an anguished Alexandra sent Rasputin a telegram begging his help, and received back a cable to say that ‘the Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.’²¹ Shortly afterwards the crisis passed. A man who could save her son even by telegram was surely a man sent by God and she would ever after be utterly dependent on him.

A distracted and desperate mother vulnerable to a charlatan? Rasputin was not, in fact, the first mystical figure to influence affairs at Tsarskoe Selo. His most notorious predecessor was a hypnotic French quack, a former butcher’s assistant from Lyons and a man well known to the French police. Calling himself Dr Philippe — his real name was Philippe Nizier-Vachod — he appeared on the scene in 1901, long before the birth of Alexis. As with Rasputin he was known as ‘our Friend’ by both Nicholas and Alexandra.

Indeed, Alexandra’s references to Dr Philippe could easily be confused with her later references to Rasputin: ‘how rich life is since we know him and everything seems easier to bear’, she would write that year. Grand Duke Konstantin would note disturbingly that, after sessions with Dr Philippe in the nearby villa of Alexandra’s long-time companion Anna Vyrubova, Tsar and Empress would return ‘in an exalted state, as if in an ecstasy with radiant faces and shining eyes’.²²

It was Dr Philippe who convinced Alexandra that she was at last, after four daughters, going to give Nicholas the son and heir she so obsessively sought. In August, 1902, as St Petersburg eagerly waited for the bells to ring and the cannon to roar, there was an unexpected disappointment. It was a phantom pregnancy,²³ although Russia could not of course be told that. Even so, ‘our Friend’ survived that embarrassing setback; it was another eighteen months before Nicholas, with regret, felt it would be wiser to dismiss him. He died shortly afterwards, in 1905, in France.

Someone was bound to step into his shoes and so it was with the arrival of a new ‘Friend’ with hypnotic eyes — Rasputin. By 1915, Paléologue concluded that Alexandra ‘lives in a kind of hypnosis’; whatever Rasputin’s opinion or desire ‘she acquiesces and obeys at once. The ideas he suggests to her are implanted in her brain without provoking the slightest opposition.’²⁴

Because few people outside court circles knew about the carefully guarded secret of Alexis’s haemophilia, wider society did not understand why Rasputin — a notorious womaniser and drunkard — was tolerated at all by Tsarskoe Selo. In the spring of 1915, British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart witnessed a disgraceful scene in an exclusive Moscow restaurant. From one of the ‘cabinets’ came wild shrieks, a man’s curses, the sound of broken glass and the banging of doors. ‘The cause of the disturbance was Rasputin — drunk and lecherous and neither police nor management dared evict him’.

It was only after a direct order from the assistant minister of the interior, General Dzhunkovsky, that Rasputin was arrested and taken away, ‘snarling and vowing vengeance’. Although released next day on ‘instructions from the highest quarter’,²⁵ the public clamour was so great that Nicholas felt impelled to send him back to his Siberian village. Two weeks later Alexandra prevailed over her husband, and Rasputin was back as before. Three weeks later the general who had dared to arrest him was sacked.

The Supreme Commander ‘Uncle Nikolasha’ was also to pay the price of offending Alexandra’s ‘Friend’. When Rasputin offered to come and bless his troops, the ramrod Grand Duke had said in reply: ‘Yes, do come. I’ll hang you.^’26 With that, the jealous Empress and the vengeful Rasputin had worked together to ensure his downfall, as they did.

Alexandra had suspected that ‘Nikolasha’ had ambitions to usurp the throne — an idea unsupported by any evidence whatsoever — because of his popularity in the army. During the Tsar’s victory tour it was noted that in contrast, as the French ambassador commented, ‘everybody has been struck by the indifference, or rather coldness, with which the Emperor was received by the army’. One reason for that, he went on to say, was that ‘the legend which has grown up around the Empress and Rasputin has been a serious blow to the prestige of the Emperor both with the men and their officers’.²⁷

Michael, shaking his head in disbelief as he convalesced in Gatchina, was as appalled as everyone else by his brother’s decision to take over the Supreme Command, but like the others he was helpless to do anything about it. Russia’s new warrior Tsar, a man who had never heard a shot fired in anger, took over the war without any idea about how that war might now be best fought, save that he would be in charge.

His cousin Andrew, visiting a ‘terribly worried’ Dowager Empress, reported that she feared that the removal of Nikolasha ‘will be the ruin’ of the Tsar and ‘laid all the blame’ on Alexandra. ‘It is all her work… she alone is responsible for all that is happening now. It is too awful.’ Her elder son Nicholas was ‘lovable, honest, good,’ but with Alexandra behind him the Dowager Empress could only wring her hands and cry, ‘What are we coming to, what are we coming to?’²⁸ Duke Alexander of Oldenburg, known in the family as ‘Uncle Alex’, was in equal despair when he saw the Dowager Empress. As she would tell Andrew afterwards, ‘he rolled on the floor’.²⁹

The young Grand Duke Dimitri — who had won the Cross of St George in 1914 after dismounting from his horse under heavy fire to carry a wounded corporal to safety — was as shocked as anyone by the news. When the French ambassador told him that he doubted that the Tsar would change his mind, Dimitri angrily threw away his cigarette and cried: ‘Then we’re lost. Henceforth it will be the Empress and her camarilla who command at Stavka! It’s maddening.’³⁰

Alexandra was quite frank, and startlingly so, in showing her dominance over her husband. When the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, met her at Tsarskoe Selo and told her of his worries about Nicholas assuming the Supreme Command, she told him: ‘The situation requires firmness. The Emperor, unfortunately, is weak; but I am not and I intend to be firm.’³¹ However true, to say that to the ambassador of an allied country, duty bound to report it to his government, was wholly unforgivable.

None the less, on August 25, 1915, the Tsar ended his first day as Supreme Commander on a confident note. ‘We had only just finished playing dominoes,’ he wrote to Alexandra, when news came that the southern army had captured ‘over 150 officers, over 7,000 men, thirty guns and many machine-guns. And this happened immediately after our troops learnt that I have taken upon myself the Supreme Command. This is truly God’s blessing…’³² To underline this sign from Heaven, he sent the same news by telegram next day, so that she could be doubly assured about ‘our glorious success’ and that ‘this happened immediately after the declaration of my appointment’.³³

MICHAEL was soon to find out for himself what life was like at Stavka with his brother as Supreme Commander, for two weeks after Nicholas took over the armies he summoned Michael to join him. With the Russian armies in retreat, general headquarters had been earlier forced to withdraw from Baranovichi and find somewhere safer.

The place chosen was the provincial capital of Mogilev, 180 miles (290km) further east and it was there, eight weeks earlier on his way back from the front, that Michael had breakfasted with Nikolasha in the tent set up beside the commander-in-chief’s train, never thinking that the next time he was at Stavka it would be with his brother in charge.

The first and most obvious change he would find was that the new Supreme Commander no longer lived in a train. ‘In view of the dampness of the wood, where the train was standing’, Nicholas took comfortable quarters in the Governor’s mansion.³⁴

The suggestion that Michael should be called to Mogilev came from Alexandra. While he had been at the front he had been ignored, but recovering from illness and back at Gatchina with ‘that wife’ of his to tell him what was being said in the capital, there was now no knowing what might happen. Alexandra wished to avoid a rival court and to make sure of that she wanted Michael with his brother, not with Natasha.

Thus, as Nicholas arrived in Mogilev, Alexandra wrote to him: ‘Won’t you send for Misha to stay a bit with you…would be so nice and homely for you, & good to get him away from her & yr. brother is the one to be with you.’³⁵ Six days later she was anxiously enquiring: Have you news from Misha? I have no idea where he is. Do get him to stop a bit with you — get him quite to yourself.’³⁶

Four days later, on Thursday, September 10, 1915, a still groggy Michael set off on the 500-mile (800km) journey southward to Mogilev. He got there next day and Nicholas immediately cabled Alexandra to say so, adding surprisingly that ‘he looks well’.³⁷ Two days later Nicholas wrote home again: ‘The weather continues to be lovely. I go out every day in a car with Misha and we spend a great deal of my leisure together, as in former years. He is so calm and charming…^’38

It was encouraging news for Alexandra, who replied by continuing to impress on Nicholas the importance of having his brother at his side — ‘your very own brother, it’s just his place and the longer he stops with you, away from her bad influence the better it is and you will get him to see things with your own eyes’.³⁹ She meant her eyes. Her only warning was that ‘I fear Misha will ask for his wife to get a title — she can’t — she left two husbands already & he is your only brother’.⁴⁰

In response, Nicholas’s letters did not encourage Alexandra in her hopes of a repentant Michael eager to admit the errors of his ways and ready to dump ‘that wife’. Nor was there anything to show him a stalwart champion of Nicholas against the dark forces of the Duma. Despite their long hours together, all that Alexandra would learn was that ‘Misha often sits with me.’⁴¹ Yet, alone together, there was plenty to say that week, and Michael did his best to say it even though, as he would later reveal, it was sadly to no avail.

Nevertheless, that week at Mogilev gave Michael, as nothing else would do, a clear insight into how his brother was conducting affairs in the midst of the greatest military, parliamentary and governmental crisis since 1905. With the enemy fast advancing, the Duma had been in such uproar that Nicholas had ordered it to be adjourned. Ministers were openly quarrelling among themselves. And every day Michael saw Nicholas sit down, cigarette in hand, and read what Alexandra believed he should be doing.

A letter might be fifteen pages long, Alexandra’s pen leaping from one thought to another, and from one demand to another. She always wrote in English, and at such speed that she often seemed to be rambling incoherently, with words frequently misspelt. In that week she wrote six letters to Nicholas, each containing an average of 2,000 words. Pausing only to stub out one cigarette and light another, Nicholas read through her letters impassively as she urged him to do this and do that.

‘I long to put my nose into everything — to wake up people, put order into all & unite all’, she had written just before Michael’s arrival.⁴² Order and unity, in fact, meant a Russia in which everyone did exactly what she told them to do.

In the event, Michael’s visit was dominated not by the terrible defeats of war but by home-front politics — a crisis meeting of ministers called to Stavka shortly after his arrival, and after they had signed a letter to the Tsar demanding the removal of the aged prime minister Ivan Goremykin, appointed in 1914. At seventy-six he was exhausted and broken: ‘the candles have already been lit round my coffin’, he said, ‘and the only thing required to complete the ceremony is myself.’⁴³

The Duma, which had not met in the first six months of 1914, was largely composed of conservative and liberal members — landowners, industrialists, lawyers, academics, and well-off businessmen. What they wanted was a greater voice in government, a share in policy-making, and ministers who were more accountable to them. The current Duma was the fourth since the now side-lined Sergei Witte had become the first prime minister in 1906. The first two had swiftly come and gone; the third had run its full course of five years and the fourth, elected in 1912, still had two years to run.

The session which had opened on July 19, 1915, had seen the emergence of a new ‘Progressive Bloc’, a liberal-conservative alliance which represented 250 of the 402 Duma deputies. Because of the military disasters at the front, this majority group demanded the creation of a ‘government of public confidence’. Alexandra had vehemently opposed the Duma being called at all — ‘it’s not their business…they speak too much…Russia, thank God, is not a constitutional country’⁴⁴ — and by the end of August 1915 she was urging Nicholas ‘only quickly shut the Duma’.⁴⁵ He did, four days later.

The closure was immediately followed by strikes at the giant Putilov munitions factory in Petrograd and did nothing to solve a growing crisis in the government itself. Most ministers favoured working more closely with the Duma and believed that what was needed was co-operation not confrontation, but their efforts were frustrated by the doddering Goremykin, whose sole policy seemed to be that of ‘for me, an imperial command is law’.⁴⁶ He seemed not to have grasped that imperial commands now came from Alexandra.

In turn, Alexandra was in no doubt about the right response to the ministerial rebellion. ‘Clean out all, give Goremykin new ministers & God will bless you…Show your fist, chastisen (sic), be the master & lord, you are the Autocrat & they dare not forget it, when they do, as now, woe unto them.’⁴⁷ Competence was no longer the determining factor in government. ‘The ministers are rotten, be decided, repremand (sic) them very severely for their behaviour.’⁴⁸

She offered Nicholas mystical support in his forthcoming confrontation with a comb blessed by Rasputin. Having told him it ‘would bring its little help’, she urged him ‘to comb your hair with His comb before the sitting of the ministers’.⁴⁹ Divinely groomed, Nicholas dealt briskly with them and proudly cabled Alexandra to say afterwards that ‘the conference passed off well. I told them my opinion sternly to their faces…⁵⁰ Michael, in witnessing this political drama, was given little encouragement that his brother would make the kind of changes which he believed were now essential. Believing in constitutional government as he did, and which he had seen to be the norm in Britain, he could not understand why his brother was so opposed to it — until he realised that it was not Nicholas but his wife who ruled the roost.

But nothing that Michael said made any difference. Nicholas listened to him, thanked him, but then went back to his desk and to his orders piling up on his desk from his wife.

The day after the ministers left, Michael left also, knowing that there was nothing more he could say that would be of any use. Afterwards, Alexandra, blind to anything but her own conviction, wrote to Nicholas to say that ‘you must miss Misha now — how nice that you had him staying with you — I am sure that it must have done him good in every sense.’⁵¹

She was to be disappointed. Seeing things through his brother’s eyes had done Michael no good whatsoever.