The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

reviewed by the Tsar’.¹ That was not evidence of competence on the battlefield, but it went to his credit when, as with other peacetime commanders, there was nothing else to go on. Ten years earlier, in the war against Japan, the Russian army had proved a disaster. There had been much-needed reforms, and new men promoted to command, but it was still an army untested on the battlefield. Confidence was high, but it always was at the start of a war.

Although his brother had approved his return, the Tsar made clear that he was anything but forgiven. He would be given a high command, but it would be far removed from the world of the Guards or even the professional cavalry. His role would be to lead a newly-formed division of Muslim horsemen from the Caucasus and who had never been in the army before. Michael’s actual appointment therefore came as a surprise to the army itself. It was a public snub and intended as such. Having walked out on the Guards cavalry, he was not to think that he could walk back in, or be given a regular command.

There were two main fronts: the northern, in East Prussia, facing the Germans, and the southern, in Galicia, facing the Austro-Hungarians. On the outbreak of war, the German plan was to defeat France first, in just six weeks, leaving their eastern border manned only by a defensive ‘holding army’ until the German armies in the west could turn and attack Russia, a plan hubristically summarised by the Kaiser as ‘lunch in Paris, dinner in St Petersburg’. The counter to this, as the French were pressed back to Paris, was that the Russians should draw off the German army by launching an offensive on the eastern front, even before they were fully ready to do so. The Russians gallantly obliged, but a month after the war began they were heavily defeated at Tannenberg in East Prussia and then suffered humiliation at the Masurian Lakes. In the first thirty days they lost some quarter-of-a- million men in East Prussia alone. One of the dead was the beaten commander of the Russian Second Army, General Aleksandr Samsonov, who walked into a wood and shot himself.² Berlin, only 150 miles away, was not going to be the cavalry canter some had boasted it would be.

Tannenberg could be explained away as a necessary sacrifice made for France and a month later there was better news on the southern front, where the Russians won important successes. Their losses were no less appalling, but they had more to show for them, advancing 100 miles across the frontier, capturing 100,000 prisoners and inflicting battle casualties of some 300,000 on the Austrians.³

Michael’s division, assigned to the Galician front in the South, facing the Austro-Hungarians, was called the Caucasian Native Cavalry; it comprised six regiments, each known by the name of the tribe or place from which it was recruited: Daghestan, Kabardin, Chechen, Tartar, Circassian, and Ingush.⁴ Each horseman — or rider as they were termed in the division — was a volunteer, because conscription laws did not apply to the Caucasus under the terms agreed when it became part of the empire.⁵

The men, natural brigands, were difficult to discipline, for they would fight each other as readily as they would come to fight the Austro-Hungarians. But they were superb horsemen, fearless in a charge and terrifying to face in battle. On a training exercise, one regiment ordered to carry out a sham attack, switched to real ammunition when they ran out of blanks. As bullets whizzed past Michael’s head, their urbane colonel murmured, ‘I can only congratulate you on being for the first time under real fire’. The brigade commander standing beside them was furious, but ‘the Grand Duke laughed’.⁶ Under Michael the division would prove itself to be among the very best of the fighting units in Russia, and earn such a reputation that it would be known simply as the ‘Savage Division.’⁷ So absolute was its loyalty to Michael that in time it would also become known as ‘the Grand Duke’s private army’.

Michael’s parade uniform was the picturesque cherkeska, the long Circassian coat which fits tightly at the waist and folds down below the knees and over the top of polished soft leather high boots. His fur cap was of grey astrakhan from a new-born lamb, and he carried a sword and a razor-sharp dagger.⁸ It was a far cry from the ceremonial dress of the Blue Cuirassiers and Chevalier Gardes, and when Natasha first saw it she hated it.

The officers were all Russian, mostly professionals, and many of them volunteers from the Guards, attracted by the idea of serving under the Tsar’s brother. Among them was the young Prince Vyazemsky, whose wife had become a friend of Natasha. After he was appointed one of Michael’s aides-de-camp he wrote to a nephew: ‘You cannot imagine how colourful the whole outfit is — the customs, the whole spirit of the thing. The officers are mostly adventurous souls with a devil-may-care attitude. Some of them have had a “tumultuous past”, but they are far from dull…’ As for the men, ‘they seem to think that the war is a great holiday and their Muslim fatalism precludes all fear of death. They adore the Grand Duke.’⁹

As headquarters chaplain, Michael recruited Natasha’s family friend, Father Popsolov, who had christened baby George in 1910. However, his most personal appointment was that of an American boxing coach; boxing was one of his enthusiasms and he saw no reason why the war should interrupt it. The commander of his Tartar regiment, Colonel Peter Polovtsov — later a senior general — remembered Michael as ‘tall, very slim, a perfect sportsman, an excellent horseman, a very good shot, and his American boxing teacher always told me that it was a pity that he was a Grand Duke, because he would have done very well as a prizefighter in the ring.’¹⁰

Michael was well pleased with the way his division had come together in its first weeks and towards the end of October 1914 he went north to the supreme headquarters, called Stavka, to meet his brother who was there on a visit from Tsarskoe Selo. The headquarters were set in a clearing inside a forest of pines and birches, just outside Baranovichi, ‘a miserable little country town,’¹¹ but which was an important railway junction and roughly at the centre of the 500-mile Russian line.

It was the first time the two brothers had seen each other in over two years, but it was not the occasion or place for a family discussion, so there was no mention of issues which were likely only to end up in a row. Nicholas simply found Michael enthusiastic about his new command. Three days later, on October 27, Nicholas wrote to Alexandra: ‘I had the pleasure of spending the whole of Saturday with Misha who has become quite his old self and is again charming.’ A little wooden church had been built beside the railway tracks and Michael and Nicholas went there for evening service, ‘and parted after dinner’.¹²

Michael went on briefly to Gatchina to finalise his affairs there and, before returning to the front and the risks of the battlefield, to write to his brother about a matter which he had not raised when they met but which continued to trouble him: the fact that four years after his birth, his son George was still illegitimate. Whilst a divisional commander’s life expectancy was considerably better than that of a junior office, rank was no protection against artillery shells, snipers, or a random bullet. Michael was also not a man to hang back in the rear; as one of his commanders would say of him later, ‘the only trouble he gave us was through his constant wish to be in the fighting-line; we sometimes had great difficulty in keeping him out of danger’.¹³

Were he to be killed in the war, as might happen, Natasha would not inherit anything. The 1912 manifesto, by which Michael’s assets had been placed in administration, remained in force; he was still in the same position as ‘a minor or a lunatic’¹⁴ and technically without rights to the management of his estates or monies. But to leave innocent little George as a bastard was surely to take punishment beyond anything which was reasonable. He said as much to Nicholas: ‘It is very hard for me to go away, leaving my family in such an ambiguous position. I wish for my only beloved son to be accepted by society as my son and not as the son of an unknown father, as he is registered on his birth certificate…Remove from me the burden of the worry that, should something happen to me, that my son would have to grow up with the stigma of illegitimacy… You alone can do this, as it is your right… And after all, he is not to blame!’¹⁵

There was no reply, and Michael set off to rejoin the Savage Division with even more reason to hope that he would come back alive. Now judged ready for action, his regiments had moved by train to the Austrian border where the wide-gauge Russian railway ended. The Russian frontline was far forward into the Carpathian Mountains, and the division rode the rest of the way to the positions selected for it as part of the Second Cavalry Corps.¹⁶

The Austrians would have good reason to fear Michael’s Muslims in the future, but the first to do so were the unfortunate inhabitants they met as they advanced over the frontier. Finding themselves on conquered territory, the men of one regiment, quartered in an Austrian village, decided to take the spoils of war, and that first night there was chaos as excited Tartars raced around the village, chasing dishevelled girls. It was only at dawn that order was restored and the most serious offenders lined up to be flogged, twenty-five lashes being considered the usual punishment, though rapists convicted at court martial could be shot. Later, two men in that regiment would be and when they were condemned the staff at Michael’s headquarters offered to provide a firing squad from another regiment. However, the Tartars insisted on carrying out the execution themselves, the two men