The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (43 page)

IN June 1917 Kirill had been given permission by Kerensky to go to Finland; he remained there with his family until 1920, when they all left for Germany. Later he and his German-born wife Ducky and their three children made their home in St Briac, on the Brittany coast. It was here on August 8, one month after the London High Court order, that Kirill tested the waters by issuing his first manifesto, declaring himself ‘Guardian of the Throne’
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— a title which confused everyone but which emboldened him a month later to issue a second manifesto in which he proclaimed himself ‘Emperor of All the Russias’, and thus as successor to the now legally-dead Michael.
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In this manifesto he stated that ‘the Russian laws of succession...do not permit the Imperial Throne to remain vacant after the death of the previous Emperor and His nearest Heir have been established’.
¹¹

This was its own confirmation of the fact that he accepted that Michael had been Emperor; that he had not abdicated as had been claimed in March 1917, and that indeed he was still Emperor until pronounced dead in London in July. If ‘the throne is never vacant’, then the only person who had been filling it until then was Michael. Nicholas and Alexis were known to have been killed in 1918, so ‘the previous Emperor and nearest Heir’ did not refer to them. Accordingly Kirill, calling himself ‘the senior member of the Tsarist House, and sole legal heir’, was declaring himself Michael’s successor in obedience to the
Fundamental Laws
governing the imperial house.
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No one was likely to say so, or even consider it, but the strategy of the Bolsheviks in denying the monarchists a ‘live banner’ by pretending that Michael was alive, not dead, now appeared to be vindicated six years later. That apart, the manifesto split the Romanov family, as it still divides them today.

Of the sixteen Grand Dukes who had been alive at the start of the war, only six lived long enough to get out of Russia. Of these, three — Kirill’s two brothers, Boris and Andrew unsurprisingly recognised him as Tsar, as did Michael’s brother-in-law Sandro. The three others — the 68-year-old former army supreme commander Nikolasha, his younger brother Peter, and Dimitri, did not. It also divided the huge numbers of monarchists then living in exile, in France, Britain, Germany, the Balkans and the United States, after the Red Army finally crushed the Whites in 1922 to become masters of all Russia.

The Dowager Empress was scathing in her condemnation. She protested to Nikolasha from her home in Denmark:

I was most terribly pained when I read Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich’s manifesto proclaiming himself EMPEROR OF ALL THE RUSSIAS. To date there has been no precise information concerning the fate of My beloved Sons or My Grandson and, for this reason, I consider the proclamation of a new EMPEROR to be premature. There is still no one who could ever extinguish in me the last ray of hope.

I fear that this manifesto will create division. This will not improve the situation but, quite the opposite, will worsen it, while Russia is tormented enough without such a thing.

If it has pleased THE LORD GOD, as he acts in HIS mysterious ways, to summon My beloved sons and grandson to HIMSELF, then, without wishing to look ahead, and with firm hope in the mercy of GOD, I believe that HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR will be elected in accordance with Our Basic Laws by the Orthodox Church in concert with the Russian People…I am sure that, as the senior member of the HOUSE OF THE ROMANOVS, You are of the same opinion as Myself.

MARIA
.
¹³

Kirill had expected bitter opposition. He told Michael’s sister Xenia that ‘I know full well that I can expect no mercy from all the malicious attacks and accusations of vanity’.
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The attacks on him were, however, founded on more than malice and charges of self-aggrandisement. The greatest practical objection to Kirill’s action was that the ‘White Russians’ were united only in their opposition to the Bolsheviks and in their belief that their enemy would not rule for long, and come that day they would all return home.

Even among those who favoured a return to the crown, many wanted that to be a decision settled by a constituent assembly — in short, on the same terms as those set out in Michael’s manifesto of March 1917. A constitutional monarchy might follow the downfall of the Bolshevik regime, and monarchists naturally hoped that it would, but the critical need was to overthrow the Bolsheviks, not divide the opposition.

Nikolasha, still widely respected as the former Supreme Commander, gave voice to that view when he issued his own manifesto in the wake of Kirill’s. The aim, he said, was to re-establish the rule of law in Russia without stipulating the form of government
¹⁵
— in effect, another restatement of Michael’s manifesto. Kirill had jumped the gun. In any case, why Kirill as Emperor? The so-called Supreme Monarchist Council, which claimed to represent majority monarchist opinion, favoured Dimitri
¹⁶
— and as it happened, so did the British government. Clinging to the small print of imperial laws, the high-minded Council held that Kirill — and his two younger brothers — were excluded from the succession because their German-born mother had not converted to Orthodoxy at the time of her marriage, as required by law.
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It did not help that Kirill had married not only a divorcée but, contrary to the law of the Russian Orthodox Church, his first cousin.

Moreover there was also the abiding memory for many monarchists of the red flag on the tower of his palace in Petrograd in March 1917 and his arrival at the Tauride Palace wearing a red bow as he marched his marines to pledge their support to the Duma, in breach of his oath of allegiance. Kirill would never admit fault then, nor fault now as he named himself Emperor, and wife ‘Ducky’ as the Empress. He also promoted his son Vladimir from prince to ‘Grand Duke’ and ‘Tsarevich’
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— a move which would further cement the divisions in the Romanov family.

To be a Grand Duke under the imperial law meant that you were the son or grandson of a Tsar; Vladimir was a great-grandson of Alexander II and as such was entitled to be styled only as a prince. As for making him the Tsarevich and next-in-line to the throne — for many the door was then not only shut but slammed in his face. It has never been opened since. The division among the Romanovs which followed Kirill’s grasp for the crown persists to this day, with his grand-daughter Marie’s claim to be ‘Head of the House of Romanov’ mocked by most.

Kirill attempted to buy his place in the sun by handing out titles to those who did support him. At the same time, in hoping to placate Natasha he promoted her from ‘Countess’ — a title she had given herself since Nicholas would never have done so — to that of Princess Brasova. He also promoted son George from Count, the title which Nicholas had reluctantly conceded under pressure from Michael, to Prince Brasov.
¹⁹
Natasha simply shrugged. It was all now meaningless anyway, but so be it. She would call herself Princess, if only because of the satisfaction it gave her to have the Romanovs bidding for her favour.

AS Dimitri had done, Natasha moved to Paris in 1927 ‘since life in London is three times more expensive than in France’.
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She had sent George to Harrow, one of the best-known public schools in Britain, and he completed his last year there in July of that year, just before his seventeenth birthday. In Paris, Natasha enrolled him in the exclusive, and equally expensive, École des Roches at Verneuil, fifty miles outside the capital; he would go on from there to the Sorbonne.

George brought with him to France his prized Norton motorcycle which he insisted on driving at high speed, much to the terror of Natasha. He had now grown to be as tall as his father, with the same slim figure. ‘He was uncannily like Uncle Misha’, thought Tata. He had the same look about him; his voice was similar; he even walked in much the same way.

Some émigrés within the divided Russian colony in Paris mentioned his name as the ‘true successor’ to the imperial throne in preference to the discredited and disliked Kirill but ‘George treated the claims made on his behalf with indifference, tinged with amusement’.
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It was in Paris that George, but not his mother, became the first beneficiary of the various interests which, on paper, sustained Natasha’s hopes of financial security in the future. In 1928 the Dowager Empress died three years after the death of her sister, the Dowager Queen Alexandra. Hvidore, the Danish property which they jointly owned, was sold. King George V and his sisters waived their claims; the proceeds, amounting to the equivalent of $57,000 in the values of the day — some $500,000 today — were therefore divided equally between Michael’s two sisters, Xenia and Olga, and his son George. It was a very handsome legacy and a more-than-welcome windfall. For George, with almost $20,000 in his bank, he could feel himself a rather rich young man. He put some ten per cent of it immediately into the purchase of a brand-new Sports Chrysler motor car.
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In July 1931, having finished his final examinations at the Sorbonne, he decided to celebrate with a holiday in the south of France. He and a Dutch friend planned to drive to Cannes, George promising Natasha that he would be back in two weeks, in time for his twenty-first birthday.

Having waved them goodbye, Natasha was playing bezique that afternoon with friends when the telephone rang in the hallway of her rented apartment at 5 rue Copernic, off the Place Victor Hugo. The Chrysler had skidded on the road near Sens, and crashed into a tree. The Dutch boy, who had been at the wheel, was killed; George was in hospital; both thighs were broken and he had severe internal injuries.

Distraught, Natasha took the first train southwards, arriving at the hospital in Sens just before midnight. She sat by his bedside all night, but there was no hope for him. George died without recovering consciousness at 11.30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 21, 1931. His body was brought back to Paris and buried in the fashionable cemetery at Passy, near the Trocadero. Hundreds attended the funeral, with Dimitri heading the procession behind the coffin, followed by a black-veiled Natasha.
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Natasha had bought two plots lying side by side at Passy, George was laid in one; the other she reserved for herself but not as the princess she had been styled three years earlier. On the cemetery receipt the name she gave was simply Mme De Brassow. So much for her view of Emperor Kirill.

THERE would be little left for Natasha after that.
‘Oh Misha! Oh, Georgie!’
she would weep in private. At 51 she was still beautiful though her hair was snow-white, but her life was over. The end would come 20 years later, but even that in itself spoke volumes about its emptiness. Then penniless and living alone in the tiny attic room of an apartment at 11 rue Monsieur on the Left Bank, her landlady threw her out when it was discovered that Natasha had cancer. Taken to the Laënneck, the nearby charity hospital in the rue de Sevres in the 7th
arrondissement
she died at 3.50 pm on January 23, 1952.
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The only clue to her identity among her pathetic effects was a faded Russian birth certificate dated 71 years earlier and naming her as plain Nathalie Sheremetevskaya — the name duly typed onto her death certificate.

However, as word spread in the dwindling band of Russian
émigrés
in Paris that Princess Brasova had died, they did what they could to give her burial the dignity denied her death. They took her to Passy to lie beside her beloved son George. Their grave is marked by a Russian cross of stone, above a chest-tomb of green-and-black marble, with the simple, gold-lettered inscription:
Fils et Epouse de S.A.I. Grand Duc Michel de Russie.

And in far-away Perm they would not forget either. Although Michael’s grave has never been found, a chapel to his memory and honour now stands in the wood where he was murdered, and there is a plaque to him on the wall of the hotel from which he was abducted. And interest increases: in 2010, the then Senator for St Petersburg, Viktor Yevtukhov — promoted deputy Minister of Justice in February 2011 — said: ‘We should know more about this man and remember him, because this memory can give our society the ethical foundation we need’. Better late than never.

Many years ago, in 1927 when he was building a literary reputation in Riga, Vladimir Gushchik, the sometime Bolshevik commissar in Gatchina who had so admired Michael, wrote an epitaph for him in his book
Taina Gatchinskogo dvortsa
, and it is one which could well stand today:

And now, remembering this man, I wonder how You, Russia,
will wash away his innocent blood? Will you ultimately be able to redeem the death of Michael the Last?
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June 12/13, 1918, Perm

Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich (
Emperor
Michael II)

July 16/17, 1918, Ekaterinburg