The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

The old prime minister Goremykin had finally been retired in January; Sturmer, at sixty-eight, was only ten years younger, but Alexandra has pressed his appointment on Nicholas because he ‘very much values Grigory wh. is a great thing’.²² In the real world he was damningly seen as ‘worse than a mediocrity’ with a ‘third-rate intellect, mean spirit, low character, doubtful honesty, no experience and no idea of State business’.²³

To give himself moral support at the Duma, Nicholas took along Michael; it was their first State appearance together in the capital since Michael’s marriage and exile. Michael, pushed to the sidelines since his return to Russia, was now being brought centre-stage for the convenience of the moment. In the eight years in which she had known Michael, this was the first time that Natasha, sitting in her box, had ever seen the two brothers together. It would be the only day she — or any of the Duma members present — would do so.

That morning Michael and Natasha had breakfasted with Duma deputy Count Kapnist, who had then escorted Natasha to the Duma and the waiting Abrikosov while Michael went off to the Pavilion at the Tauride Palace to join his brother at the ceremonial entrance into the adjacent Catherine Hall. Nicholas was ‘deadly pale and his hands were trembling with agitation’.²⁴ He was not looking forward to the ceremony.

The Catherine Hall was packed, with diplomats as well as Duma members, the mood hopeful that the Tsar’s visit would prove the beginning of change for the better, an expectation encouraged by the presence of Michael, whose support for the Duma was taken as fact by those lobbied by Natasha over the past year. Duma members wanted the Tsar to be no less supportive. As the influential Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov put it to Paleologue, what Nicholas had never understood was that his party was not ‘the opposition against His Majesty but His Majesty’s Opposition’.²⁵ Perhaps today he would alter that view. Most hoped so.

After a Te Deum, throughout which Nicholas stood pale, his mouth tightened and his discomfort obvious, he made a short welcoming speech, ‘stopping and stumbling over every word’. To Paleologue it was ‘painful to watch’.²⁶ It was also disappointing for those members who hoped that he was going to announce some important reform. There was nothing of that; what he had offered was a gesture, but no more.

When Nicholas left, Michael stayed on, taking a seat in the semi-circular assembly hall for the whole of the three-hour session, which closed with the Progressive Bloc calling for a government of ‘public confidence’.

Michael thought that Serge Shidlovsky, the Progressive’s leader, ‘spoke well’, but he was unimpressed by the new prime minister Sturmer, ‘who could hardly be heard’.²⁷ Mikhail Rodzyanko, president of the State Duma, was also dismissive of Sturmer, who left the speaker’s tribune ‘amid dead silence…from the very outset Sturmer revealed himself as an utter nonentity’.²⁸

That evening, Michael and Natasha were also at the opening session of the 192-strong Council of State, of which half the members were appointed by the Tsar and the others by an amalgam of institutions, including the Church, universities, landowners and the nobility. Once again, Nicholas turned up briefly, was escorted into the meeting room by Michael, made another short and no more successful speech, and then departed back to Tsarskoe Selo, having been received in ‘an atmosphere of cold officialdom’.²⁹

Having said goodbye to his brother, Michael returned to the assembly room and joined Natasha’s box where she was sitting with her friend Count Kapnist. As earlier in the day, he stayed for the full session.³⁰

Merely by being there, in the company of a Duma deputy, Michael was making his own political statement and endorsing as clearly as he could his support for a new start in Russian government. But at Tsarskoe Selo that would be thought of only as confirmation that it was time for him to get back to the war. As Alexandra had already told Nicholas, ‘I assure you that it is far better that he should be in his place there, than here with her bad set’.³¹

In turn, that ‘bad set’ was wondering how best to get rid of Alexandra.

7. WAR ON TWO FRONTS

MICHAEL went back to the war immediately after the reopening of the Duma in February 1916. Promoted to lieutenant-general, the 2nd Cavalry Corps, his new command, comprised the six regiments of his old Savage Division, as well as a Cossack division and a Don Cossack brigade. The corps was part of the Seventh Army under General Shcherbachev and its front was on the far left of the Russian line, south of Tarnopol and therefore in the same general area where Michael had been in 1915.¹

Michael had spent Christmas with his family at Brasovo, their first time at his country estate since the spring of 1912.² Nicholas had at last given up his control of Michael’s assets, his manifesto in October 1915 removing the ‘madman’ order imposed after his marriage. In the three years in which Brasovo had been subject to the guardianship order it had been sadly neglected, as Michael discovered. His former ADC Mordvinov, appointed by the Tsar, had proved a bad manager and he was dilatory in rendering his accounts, in handing over estate papers, and jeopardising urgent repair work.³

Natasha complained endlessly about inefficiencies in his personal office in Petrograd, based in rooms set aside in his embankment hospital, and about the way in which, in his absence, his various retainers, servants, and appointees were either incompetent, greedy, or light-fingered. Every month Michael had money transferred to England to pay the rent and bills on his Paddockhurst estate — the lease would not end until September 1916 — but ‘they never send it on time, there is always a delay of about two weeks.’ ⁴ When their hospital in Gatchina was temporarily closed for repairs, Natasha reported that the supply manager continued ordering provisions for it, selling them to local shopkeepers and keeping the cash. He succeeded in stealing a whole ‘railway car full of meat, cereals and flour’.⁵

Petitions to his office from wounded soldiers were also causing difficulties. A month after Michael returned to the front they were running at some sixty per day and rising. Michael was generous but, as Natasha warned, the word had got round, so that every soldier satisfied brought in other soldiers eager to claim the same. ‘You can’t support the entire wounded army on your own money’, Natasha pointed out. There had to be a budget ‘otherwise there will never be enough’.⁶

Michael had arranged that Natasha had her own money, so that she was financially independent, with enough funds to do charitable works of her own choosing. One of her interests was a hospital in Kiev, funded by her but bearing Michael’s name. A large portrait of her had been hung in the entrance hall, but in June 1916, arriving there unannounced, she found it had been taken down and hidden in a back room. The hospital was expecting a visit by the Dowager Empress, who had moved to Kiev to be near to her daughter Olga and her hospital there and the management had decided that sight of Natasha’s picture was likely to cause offence to her disapproving mother-in-law.

Natasha was incensed. Not only was it maintained entirely at her cost, but she was constantly sending gifts there both for wounded soldiers, and staff. ’It was extremely disrespectful…for my own part I will complete detach myself from this hospital and if they want more money they can ask the people whose pictures do cover their walls.’⁷

Two weeks later she was complaining bitterly to Michael that even his own hospital in Petrograd was the subject of official slights, with attempts to remove his name from it. Natasha blamed Alexandra. ‘She hates you and does all she can to prevent your name even being mentioned. Petrograd is full of hospitals bearing the names of the Heir, Olga, Nikolasha and others — and in your name there is only one, which they are trying to get rid of. And that’s a hospital where the officers’ ward exists entirely on your money, so it is virtually your hospital…’⁸

Proof of just how petty and vindictive Alexandra was being came only a few days later. Just before Michael had returned to the front, he and Natasha had gone to the studios of fashionable Boissonnas & Eggler and had a series of pictures together, as well as separately. Later, a leading Petrograd society magazine opted to feature one of her photographs on its front page, together with a glowing description of her hospital work. Encouraged by that, Boissonnas & Eggler decided to mount a window exhibition devoted to Michael and Natasha, using the pictures taken in February. He was a war hero; she was beautiful and increasingly celebrated — in combination the studio thought that would be good business for them.