The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (30 page)

The effect was disastrous, for it essentially made officers subservient to the dictates of ‘soldier committees’ established in every military formation, which took away the control of arms from officers, and in some instances dictated what military action might, or might not, be taken against the enemy.

Off-duty soldiers were to be treated as civilians, with no requirement to salute or stand to attention; officers were ‘prohibited’ from speaking to soldiers ‘rudely’. In some units, ‘soldier committees’ insisted on electing their own officers, and expelling those they judged to be too strict or who were suspected of wanting to get on with the war. No wonder, then, that there was no place in this new ‘democratic people’s army’ for Michael or any other Grand Duke, including ‘Uncle Nikolasha’, reappointed Supreme Commander by Nicholas before he abdicated. The new government had simply sacked him.
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Paléologue estimated that there were well over a million deserters roaming Russia. ‘Units have been turned into political debating societies,’ reported the British military observer Alfred Knox after a tour of the northern front. Front-line infantry refused to allow the artillery to shoot at the enemy in case the enemy shot back, and fraternised daily with the Germans facing them. As for the troops in Petrograd, ‘the tens of thousands of able-bodied men in uniform who saunter about the streets without a thought of going to the front…will be a disgrace for all-time to the Russian people and its government’.
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Michael thought the same, and said so in a letter to a British friend, Major Simpson. ‘I want you to know that I am very much ashamed of my countrymen, who are showing too little patriotism ever since the revolution, and who are forgetting their agreement with the Allies, who have done so much to help them. But nonetheless I hope that the return of their good feelings will prevent them becoming traitors.’
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One consolation for Michael was that his own Savage Division had remained immune to the breakdown in discipline. Officers and men were as rock-steady after the revolution as they had been before. He would also have been proud to know that when an officer returned from Petrograd to his Muslim regiment, he found that ‘one question seemed to interest the men most — the fate of Grand Duke Michael’. When he replied that he was in Gatchina and that he was ‘safe for the moment’ the men would shake their heads and mumble, ‘Allah preserve him — he is a real
dzhigit
. Why didn’t he come to us when it all happened: we would never have given him up.’
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SITTING in Michael’s house, Grand Duke George decided that he could no longer stand living in this new Russia. He had accepted the emergence of the new government ‘but what he had seen after that,’ he wrote to his wife in England, ‘is enough to make your hair stand on end. I would like to leave the country at once.’ He was also tiring of Gatchina: ‘Misha is so nice but his wife is so vengeful about the Romanovs’.
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George was not sure how much more he could take of her outbursts.

His natural hope was that he would go to England, where his wife, the daughter of the late King George of Greece, had been stranded since the outbreak of war. Accordingly, three weeks after the new government came into being, he went to see Buchanan to seek permission to travel to England.

Although he was not directly connected to the British royals, his wife Marie was a niece of the Dowager Queen Alexandra, as was Michael. So, in the hope of increasing his chances, he told Buchanan that Michael was also keen on going back to his waiting estate in Sussex. He told Buchanan that he saw no hope for Russia with the Soviet pulling the strings. ‘Everything was being confiscated…and to think that these brutes will probably govern the country…it will become a country of savages…every decent person will leave.’
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George’s inclusion of Michael as being his co-applicant was not entirely as he presented it to Buchanan. Walking in the palace park, George had talked to Michael about getting away, and Michael had told him that he was also thinking of going to London. The difference between the two was that George wanted to get out altogether, whereas Michael was thinking only of a short trip, without his family, and with the intention of getting back as soon as he could.

The reason in his case was that, freed of all responsibility, Natasha had urged him to get specialist treatment for his ‘damned stomach pains’ which had so often laid him low in the past. There had been previous discussions in the last couple of years about having treatment in Britain but because of his military duties it had been ‘impossible for him to get to the great specialists who could have dealt with it radically,’ his stepdaughter Tata recalled
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. Now, with time on his hands, Natasha saw the chance for him to get the treatment he needed.

In those early days of the new government, Michael assumed that there would be no difficulty in getting permission to go abroad for a few weeks perhaps. After all, he would be leaving his wife and family behind, and that in itself would be sufficient surety that he would be coming back. The Soviet might bark protests, but surely Kerensky would satisfy them that it was for genuine medical treatment, and nothing more than that. In the event the refusal he feared did not come from the Soviet, but from his cousin King George V at Buckingham Palace. The king had shut the door on any Romanovs coming to Britain. He had enough problems with his own throne.

THE Romanov who posed the greatest difficulty for King George was ex-Tsar Nicholas, notwithstanding the close family ties and long friendship, and the loyalty he had shown as an ally. His fall from power had been welcomed by liberals worldwide — by American President Woodrow Wilson as well as by British prime minister Lloyd George. But liberal sentiment was not the problem. ‘Bloody Nicholas’ was a hated figure among British socialists, holding as they did an idealised view of the Russian revolution; and what they were not prepared to accept was any idea that he might be offered refuge in Britain.

On March 9, six days after his abdication, Nicholas had returned to Tsarskoe Selo, escorted by Duma deputies on his imperial train. With that he began what was in effect a prison sentence. He and his family — the children no less than their parents — were confined to their apartments in the palace and restricted for exercise to a small area of the park outside. They were guarded day and night, and while the bayonets were protection from potential attacks by Soviet extremists they were also a bar to the outside world. The family were captives, under threat that they face worse than house arrest. The Soviet continued to clamour for their confinement in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul.

There were endless petty humiliations. Soldiers enjoyed taunting them; crowds of spectators at the outer railings would peer in, hissing and booing. It was an ordeal borne with dignity, and in the confidence that it was only temporary — that they would very shortly be sent aboard into exile. Pierre Gilliard, the Swiss tutor employed at Tsarskoe Selo, would remember that ‘there was endless talk about our imminent transfer to England’.
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The Provisional Government, worried by Soviet threats, encouraged that idea as the best way of keeping the family out of reach of vengeful revolutionaries. The British government quickly signalled that it was willing to take them, assuming in doing so that the king, Nicholas’s first cousin, would surely support that — they were family.

Buckingham Palace, however, was aghast at the prospect. King George was alarmed not just by the inevitable left-wing protests which would greet any move to give ‘Bloody Nicholas’ sanctuary but that the British royals were themselves facing increased hostility over the fact that, although British by birth and upbringing, they were all of German descent. When even a dachshund risked being kicked in the street the British king, with a German father-in-law, and German relatives all around him, was understandably sensitive about being damned as a German. British republicanism was not deep-seated but it was very noisy.

It would not be long before anti-German sentiment would be so great that the British royals in the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, as Queen Victoria thought it to be, would reinvent themselves under the more agreeable name of the House of Windsor. By Order-in-Council of July 17, 1917, Alexandra’s eldest sister Victoria, of Hesse-Darmstadt until she married Prince Louis Battenberg, disappeared, to be replaced by the terribly English-sounding Marchioness of Milford Haven, though she had never been there. Other Battenbergs were translated into Mountbatten and Carisbrooke; the German title of Teck became Athlone.

With this looming ahead, King George was not pleased to find himself caught up in the problems of a Russian autocrat with a German wife and for whom there was almost no sympathy in any quarter. However, his objections were at first set aside by the British government on the grounds that the offer having been made, it could not be withdrawn.

It was at this point on March 23 that the cable came into London from Buchanan asking that the names of Grand Dukes Michael and George be added to the list of those seeking refuge in London.

Now two ex-Emperors knocking on the door? It gave opportunity for Buckingham Palace to re-open the case for barring Nicholas. ‘I do trust that the whole question…will be reconsidered,’ wrote the king’s private secretary Lord Stamfordham to the foreign secretary Balfour. ‘It will very hard on the King and arouse much public comment if not resentment.’
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More shots came in from Buckingham Palace. ‘The residence in this country of the ex-Emperor and Empress…would undoubtedly compromise the position of the King and Queen…we must be allowed to withdraw from the consent previously given.’
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Yet George V was fully aware of the dangers facing his cousin if he was not granted refuge. ‘I fear that if poor Nicky goes into the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul he will not come out alive,’ he later wrote in his diary.
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Could the problem be avoided if Nicholas went instead to France? The reply from the British ambassador in Paris was that ‘The Empress is not only a Boche by birth but in sentiment…she is regarded as a criminal or a criminal lunatic, and the ex-Emperor as a criminal from his weakness and submission to her promptings.’
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As the British agonised, the Provisional Government itself stepped away from the idea of sending Nicholas abroad. The Soviet would have none of it, and with that the new government pledged that it would not again give permission for any member of the imperial family to leave Russia without the agreement of the Soviet. That conveniently allowed the British to let their invitation to wither on the vine. The Romanovs were stranded.

UNLIKE the miserable house-arrest suffered by Nicholas and his family in Tsarskoe Selo, Michael and his family in Gatchina lived very much as before. In many respects his own day-to-day life changed little as the weeks went on. He was free to move within the Petrograd area, though not beyond without a permit. He could drive into the country in his Rolls-Royce or his new Packard — ordered before the war, but which had unexpectedly turned up at his house a year earlier; he could have friends to stay, and afford staff and a houseload of servants. Walking about the town, people still bowed to him in the street,
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and while there were now guards posted in Nikolaevskaya Street they were there only to keep away hooligans and looters. As even George admitted in one letter to his wife, ‘the government is trying to be as polite as possible with us, I must own that they have been quite correct towards us’.
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Although Michael’s annual income from the imperial purse had stopped, as it had for all Romanovs, and his imperial yacht requisitioned along with his train carriage, he still had ample cash in the bank. He also continued to receive some income from his retained private holdings, including his Ukraine sugar factory and his Brasovo estate. His real concern about Brasovo was that he was not permitted to go there to look after its affairs and its people as he usually did. The government in deference to the Soviet had refused a permit.

The man a future constituent assembly might therefore confirm as Emperor was thus virtually a prisoner in his own country, even though he was not confined as was his brother and his family in Tsarskoe Selo. Nonetheless, in itself that made a mockery of the promises given by the Duma men on March 3. The powers he had vested in them to ensure orderly and responsible government had clearly been hijacked by the disorderly and irresponsible men in the Soviet.

Yet otherwise he could not complain about his life in Gatchina. He had bought another house for his staff, on Baggout Street where Natasha had lived when she was married to Wulfert, and at the end of April he rented another in Kseniinsky Street, by the Priorate. ‘The house has two floors, we’re thinking of it for our servants,’ he noted in his diary for May 5, 1917.
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He had spent the day inspecting the house, planning to enlarge the garden, and discussing with Natasha the final furnishings, due for delivery nine days later.
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