The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (20 page)

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

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.
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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,
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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They were not just crack troops — as Alexandra said to her loyal confidante, Lili Dehn, they were ‘our personal friends’.
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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 train
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— 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But once there he put his real feelings into his diary. ‘Shame and dishonour,’ he wrote despairingly.
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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
’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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