The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (25 page)

At Pskov itself, with Nicholas gone, a
Te Deum
was ordered for the new Emperor in the cathedral. Dimitri’s sister Marie went to the morning service, as did Ruzsky and his generals. The square beside the cathedral was crowded with soldiers, many of them wearing a red rosette, ‘their faces agitated’. Inside, a packed congregation heard the manifesto of Nicholas read out, and then prayed ‘for the prolongation of the days of the new Tsar’.
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As the morning wore on, even in far-off Crimea, and around the ex-Tsar’s favourite home at Livadia, people celebrated Michael’s succession. The American-born Princess Cantacuzène, grand-daughter of US President Grant, and one of Petrograd’s leading hostesses, was on holiday at Yalta at that time, and remembered that Nicholas’s portraits disappeared ‘from shop windows and walls within an hour after the reading of the proclamation; and in their place I saw by the afternoon pictures of Michael Aleksandrovich. Flags were hung out, and all faces wore smiles of quiet satisfaction. It was very bad; now it will be better, was the general, calm verdict. The supposition of a constitutional monarch was the accepted idea.’
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In Moscow, where the garrison had also gone over to the revolution, although without any of the excesses which had occurred in Petrograd, the succession of Michael was greeted with ‘wooden indifference’ on the part of the revolutionaries;
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there were no marching protests or riots and no sign of resistance of the kind so feared by Rodzyanko in the hot-house of the Tauride Palace.

When Alexandra’s sister Grand Duchess Ella heard the news at the Chudov Abbey of which she was abbess, her sole concern was the question of Natasha. Told by a monk that in the next service the liturgy would be changed to ‘Our Right Orthodox and Sovereign Lord and Emperor Michael’, she protested: ‘What about…?’ The monk broke in hurriedly. ‘Ah, Matushka, there will be no mention of the lady.’
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There would be no prayers for Natasha, but otherwise the faithful crossed themselves and prayed for Michael. Even in Petrograd, the storm centre of the revolution, the news of his succession was greeted with cheers, at least outside the citadels of the revolutionaries.

At Warsaw station, when Guchkov and Shulgin arrived back from Pskov, the two delegates decided to make the first proclamation about Michael.
‘Long live Emperor Michael
’ they cried as they hurried from their train, cheered by the people as they went by. When Shulgin walked into the station’s huge entrance hall, a transit battalion of frontline troops, surrounded by a curious crowd, was drawn up there as they waited to change trains. Shulgin read out the manifesto and, lifting his eyes from the paper, called for three cheers for ‘His Majesty Emperor Michael II’. The battalion and the crowd responded with cheers that ‘rang out, passionate, genuine, emotional’.
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Shulgin strode back into the station, the crowd making way for him as he went forward looking for Guchkov. Suddenly he was aware of an urgent voice telling him that he was wanted on the telephone in the station-master’s office. When he walked in and picked up the receiver it was to hear the croaking voice of Milyukov. ‘Don’t make known the manifesto’, barked Milyukov. ‘There have been serious changes.’

A startled Shulgin could only stammer a reply. ‘But how?...I have already announced it.’

‘To whom?’

‘Why, to all here. Some regiment or other. The people. I have proclaimed Michael Emperor.’

‘You should not have done that’, shouted Milyukov. ‘Feelings have become much worse since you left…Don’t take any further steps. There may be great misfortune.’
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Bewildered, Shulgin put down the phone, and looked around for Guchkov. He had gone off to a meeting of 2,000 men in some nearby railway workshops, he was told, intent on spreading the glad tidings of Michael’s succession. Shulgin was about to go after him when he remembered that he still had the manifesto in his pocket. The railway shopmen had been staunch supports of the Soviet; if he went in, would he get out?

At that moment the telephone rang. This time it was Bublikov, the man whom the Duma Committee had appointed as Railway Commissioner. He was sending his own man to the station. ‘You can trust him with anything…Understand?’ Shulgin understood perfectly. A few minutes later Bublikov’s messenger thrust himself through the crowd and Shulgin slipped him the envelope bearing the manifesto. The man took it and disappeared back to the transport ministry offices, where it was hidden under a pile of old magazines.

Shulgin then headed for the workshops, where Guchkov was standing on a platform above a dense mass of railwaymen, being harangued by its chairman, sneering protests about a new government led by a prince and full of landowners and wealthy industrialists.

‘Is this what we had the revolution for, comrades? Prince Lvov?’ It was clearly not the time nor place to cry out ‘Long Live Emperor Michael’.

As Shulgin joined Guchkov on the platform, the seething workers began to move forward menacingly. Here were two representatives of this bourgeois government, sent secretly to confer with the Tsar at Pskov. Whom did they really represent? ‘Shut the doors, comrades,’ cried the leaders.

The situation looked nasty, but then the railmen began to quarrel amongst themselves, with some shouting that the shopmen on the platform were behaving ‘like the old regime’. Pushing, shoving, the crowd began to turn on its own, with voices calling out for Guchkov to be allowed to speak. He did so, briefly, defending the aims of the new government but prudently deciding not to mention Michael. As tempers cooled, the doors were opened again, and a shaken Guchkov and Shulgin were allowed to leave.
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By then the news of the proclamations read out at the Warsaw station had raced across the city. Lawyer Vladimir Nabokov, unaware that he was soon to play a critical role in the future of the monarchy, heard about Michael’s succession twice over as he was walking to work from his apartment on the Morskaya, and when he reached his office he found ‘great excitement, with crowds on the stairs and in the big conference hall’.
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Curiously, one of the last to discover the name of the new Emperor of All the Russias was Michael himself. When Kerensky telephoned the apartment at 5.55 a.m. he made no mention of the manifesto. The new government was not yet ready to tell him about that.

MILLIONNAYA Street was half-awake when Kerensky made his call. The apartment was spacious; even so, it was exceptionally crowded this Friday morning. Officers of the guard were sleeping in the study and Michael, his brother-in-law Matveev and Johnson were sleeping on settees and makeshift beds. Matveev had brought in fresh shirts and underwear since Michael had arrived in Millionnaya Street with only the clothes they were standing up in.

Johnson took the call from Kerensky and learned only that the ‘Council of Ministers’ would be arriving for a meeting in about an hour. Michael was not surprised for they were expecting formal news of Nicholas’s abdication; but as Matveev would firmly record, ‘in the light of the letter from the President of the State Duma Rodzyanko’ delivered the evening before, they assumed that the delegation was coming ‘to report on the Regency’. While they waited, Michael was ‘therefore thinking over his appropriate reply expressing his consent’.
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The telephone call that ought to have been made to Millionnaya Street that morning would not have been at 5.55 but some two hours earlier, or just after 3 a.m. At Tsarskoe Selo that was the time that the garrison commander first tried to call Grand Duke Paul to tell him about the manifesto just received from Pskov; he thought it best if it was Paul who broke the news to Alexandra. Because he could not get through, an officer was sent to his palace. Paul came down in his dressing gown, and an artillery colonel, with a large red bow on his chest, read them the text of Nicholas’s abdication. ‘We realised at once that all was finished’, said Paul’s wife Princess Paley.
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Paul, in the event, could not bring himself to go to the Alexander Palace until 11 a.m. There he found Alexandra in her hospital uniform, still unaware that she was no longer Empress. After Paul told her what had happened, tears rolled down her cheeks, and she bent her head as if praying. ‘If Nicky has done that, it is because he had to do so...God will not abandon us...As it is Misha who is Emperor, I shall look after my children and my hospital. We shall go to the Crimea.’
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That Alexandra would not know of the abdication until mid-morning was understandable; that the new Emperor was not formally told as soon as the news reached Petrograd was astonishing. The silence was deliberate.

One reason why the new government was anxious that Michael should not know about the manifesto making him Emperor was that they did not want him better prepared than they were when eventually they did meet him. Kerensky would later gloss over the details of his telephone call to Millionnaya Street, but he would say of Michael that ‘we did not know how much he knew’ while adding that it was important ‘to prevent whatever steps he was planning to take until we had come to a decision’.
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Whatever steps? There was only one action that Michael would have taken had he found out independently that he had been named Emperor, and that would have been to telephone Prince Lvov at the Tauride Palace and summon him to Millionnaya Street, with doubtless a few others, but not the entire Committee. The problem then is that he would have been asking the awkward questions, and Prince Lvov would not have had the answers.

If Milyukov, leader of the largest bloc in the Duma had insisted on accompanying Lvov to such a meeting — after all, Lvov was a man he had championed — that could have been awkward for those at the Tauride Palace who, led by Kerensky but also ‘blue funk’ Rodzyanko, were now more concerned about saving the new Provisional Government and themselves than saving the monarchy.

At 6 a.m. Kerensky, after his brief telephone call to Millionnaya Street, knew that Michael had not been told independently about the manifesto. Saying that the delegation would be with him in about an hour was more hope than reality. The hope was that the delegation, the majority of them already defeatist on the issue of the manifesto, could be with Michael before he had a chance to find out he was Emperor. The streets would be dark, the city scarcely awake, and with luck they could browbeat a stunned Michael into surrender before the Soviet had time to start browbeating them.

However, he had reckoned without Milyukov’s resistance to any
fait accompli
as well as his insistence that they should wait until Guchkov and Shulgin — he counted on both as allies — got back to the Tauride Palace. As time went by, one question settled itself: that the manifesto had been circulated across the country and that the cat was well and truly out of the bag. The Soviet now also knew that Michael was Emperor, and the resulting clamour among the mutineers left the Duma majority in no doubt of what that meant for them. Impatient to get Michael out of the way, the transport minister Nekrasov set to work on drafting an abdication manifesto they would take with them to Millionnaya Street. By noon, the majority hoped that they would be bringing it back with his signature to the Tauride Palace. In presenting that to the Soviet, they could show themselves master of events — men of action, not chatter.

With no sign of Guchkov and Shulgin, held up by their adventures in the railway workshops, Milyukov could not delay the delegation any longer and by 9.15 a.m. it began to assemble in Millionnaya Street — later than Kerensky had hoped, but still time enough to believe they could be back triumphant in the Tauride Palace by noon. Michael, they accepted, must have heard the news that he was Emperor — since it was all round the city by now — but he would have had no time to think out what that entailed. He would also be alone, in a room packed with men determined in the main to get rid of him. How could they lose?

MICHAEL had found out that he was Emperor in the time in which he had been waiting to meet the delegation as Regent. The telephones were working, and as the news spread across the capital the line into Millionnaya Street was blocked with calls. Natasha, in Gatchina, could still not get through to Petrograd, but the local telephone system there was working as normal — there were 250 numbers on the Gatchina exchange — and that Friday morning her phone ‘never stopped ringing’ her daughter Tata remembered.
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That was hardly surprising: the garrison commandant in Gatchina had his copy of the cabled manifesto at 3 a.m., the same time as at Tsarskoe Selo, and woke up the house to tell Natasha that she was now wife of the Emperor. The excitement was matched by the frustration at not being able to contact Michael, and find out what was going on in Petrograd.

The only personal caller at Millionnaya Street as the capital awoke that Friday morning was Bimbo, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, who lived in the palace across the road. Two evenings before, Bimbo — whose brother George was staying with Natasha — had joined Michael for supper,
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discussing his role as Regent, and as ever advancing his own liberal ideas on the shape of the monarchy to come. He returned early on Friday morning, for Princess Putyatina remembered him being there. Someone had called him with the news already racing around Petrograd. He was ‘up-to-date with everything and he knew that the Emperor had abdicated’, she wrote. According to her version, Bimbo said that ‘I am very happy to recognise you as Sovereign, since in fact you are already the Tsar! Be brave and strong: in this way you will not only save the dynasty but also the future of Russia!’
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