The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

Natasha at thirty-five, though it was her good fortune to seem younger than her years, was looking better than ever before. She turned heads wherever she went, as the French ambassador would confirm for himself when he chanced upon her for the first time at Soloviev’s, a bookshop in the Liteiny, near to the apartment in which Natasha had spent so many unhappy months four years earlier, in 1912.

Paleologue was already in the shop and glanced up as she walked in. Though he did not know who she was, he could not take his eyes off her. Leaving the bookshop he saw a ‘very smart car’ parked behind his. His chauffeur, noting his interest, asked him: ‘Didn’t your Excellency recognise the lady?’ Paleologue shook his head. She is ‘the wife of His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich’, said the chauffeur.⁹ Paleologue needed to hear no more. The woman he had seen in the shop was not only extraordinarily beautiful, but from what he had been told at the dinner tables, dangerous. He would never see her again, but he would never forget her. That night he devoted his diary to her charms.

As I was examining several fine 18th-century French editions in the back of his empty shop, I saw a slender young woman of about thirty come in and take a seat at a table on which an album of prints was laid out. She was a delight to watch. Her whole style revealed a quiet, personal and refined taste… Her pure and aristocratic face is charmingly modelled and she has light velvety eyes. Round her neck a string of superb pearls sparkled in the light… There was a dignified, sinuous and soft gracefulness about her every movement… ¹⁰

That portrait was precisely the kind that Alexandra was determined to destroy, which was why she was so enraged when told that the exhibition at Boissonnas & Eggler was drawing crowds. Her immediate response was to order Prince Obolensky, governor of the imperial palace, to have the exhibition closed down. On Friday morning, July 15, 1916, he arrived with the police, who then stood by to ensure that the studio cleared the window.

‘I cannot tell you how incensed I am at such disgraceful treatment,’ she wrote to Michael. It was humiliation, with ‘the public driving past to witness how the shop was cleared of our pictures with the police being present and all the stir it created…’¹¹

Michael was equally outraged, and also furious with the palace governor, who had served under him in the Chevalier Gardes, but who still followed the Tsarskoe Selo line that Natasha was unspeakable and a menace to the rightful order. ‘I was greatly appalled’ he wrote. ‘That’s such impudence, such disgraceful lack of tact… it’s not for nothing that I have always despised Petrograd high society… there are no people more devious than they are; with a few exceptions, they are all scum.’¹²

To Natasha, his appointment to command the 2nd Cavalry Corps also served to show that Tsarskoe Selo’s aim was to keep him as far away from the capital as they could. ‘None of the other Grand Dukes sits in such a hole as you do, so why should you be worse off than the others?’¹³ Petrograd was crowded with braided Guards officers stationed only a few hours from the capital, and even Stavka was only a day away. ‘They shove you into the worst possible place’ because, she said, ‘they want to get rid of you.’¹⁴

Michael objected to the idea that he was only at the front because of court machinations. ‘It is a matter of conscience, too. I would be ashamed to be somewhere on the home front, when the Russian people are shedding their blood for their country and for future peace’. If the war had any purpose now, he added, it was as ‘a war for peace’.¹⁵

But even he could not close his eyes to some snubs. There had been no announcement of his appointment to command a Corps, and in July 1916 he found that his name was not included in the list of ADCs to the Tsar. As a Grand Duke it was the convention that on promotion to lieutenant-general he would simultaneously be made an ADC to the Tsar — an adjutant-general. In itself it meant little, but he would have worn different epaulettes, and aiguillettes in gold rather than silver.

Although privately Michael remained indifferent to such distinctions, he had ordered the gold insignia, because his Corps expected to see him wearing them, and that having been promoted he would then have a ‘formal position in the Retinue’.¹⁶ It was only then that he found that he was to be the exception: he had not been made an ADC. That was a public slap in the face; it was also in his mind an insult to his Corps.

An oversight? Coming as it did at the same time as the police were removing his photographs from the shop window, Natasha thought not. ‘The Tsar is deliberately set against you’, she said.¹⁷

‘All I will say’, replied Michael tersely, ‘is that it is not a misunderstanding, but was deliberately done that way. Therefore I believe that no one should remind or ask the Sovereign about it, not even in ten years’ time.’¹⁸

MICHAEL’S corps was involved in heavy fighting all that summer. The Brusilov Offensive, so called because it was his south-western armies which launched it, promised to reverse the defeats of the last twelve months, and breakthrough the Carpathians to Vienna — a repeat of the hopes of April 1915. By the end of June, Michael noted that the ‘approximate count of prisoners in the whole offensive was 5,620 officers and 266,000 men, 312 guns, 833 machine-guns’.¹⁹ The Austrians had been mauled, but then so had the Russians.

On both the western and the eastern fronts in the First World War, casualties were horrific; indeed when Michael was recording his statistics, the British had suffered 58,000 casualties, half the men involved, and 20,000 of them dead on just the first day of their offensive on the Somme. In the previous year, the total casualties on the western front — French, British, German — had been two million. In the past few months the battle of Verdun had turned into a bloodbath.

Michael hated the slaughter on both sides. The sight of a dying Czech prisoner in a field dressing station could sadden him, enemy or not. ‘There are so many such unfortunate heroes who are dying away from their country and worse still — away from their nearest and dearest and in strangers’ hands. I was sorry for that poor Czech as much as for anyone else’, he told Natasha.²⁰

As the summer wore on the casualties on the Russian front continued to mount, but the prize slipped away. Elation was followed by disappointment. Brusilov was one of the best generals in any army in that war, but although the Russian line had been pushed forward, overall there was little to show for the sacrifice. The Guards Army, judged the best troops of all, were wasted by clumsy generalship — one corps ruined by incompetence on the part of its newly-appointed commander Grand Duke Paul ‘whose only failing was that he knew nothing about military affairs’,²¹ commented Brusilov. Paul had been stricken with gallstones, and was in no condition to go to war. After the mishandling of his corps he was quietly removed from his post and returned unheroically to Tsarskoe Selo, which he would have been better never to have left.

In contrast, Michael would earn his second high gallantry award — the red enamel cross of the Order of St Vladimir with Swords ‘for distinction in action against the enemy’.²² As a corps commander he was, of course, less exposed to personal danger than before, but occasionally there were brushes on the frontline. On August 23, returning from a conference at his old Savage Division headquarters, his driver took the wrong turning and headed straight for the Austrian lines. After half a mile ‘we were bombarded by an Austrian outpost…several bullets whizzed by’. To get them out of it, ‘I took the wheel because I knew how to drive better’.²³ Fortunately, unlike most generals, Michael preferred to sit at the front, not in the back, so it was a matter of only a few frantic seconds before he had thrust aside his hapless corporal, and was reversing at high speed back down the road. He made no mention of that to Natasha, but he did admit that ‘there has been very severe and very bloody fighting all this time’.²⁴

There was then a lull in his sector. He took the opportunity to travel to Mogilev, arriving there on August 31. He had last seen his brother in March when Nicholas came south to Kamanets-Podolsky to inspect units. Michael had told his brother then that when his next appointment came along he would like a transfer to headquarters. Nicholas would have none of it. The two parted on strained terms.

Afterwards, Nicholas wrote to Alexandra, telling him about his request. ‘Then I began to preach to him about our father, about the sense of duty, example to others and so forth. When I had finished and we had said goodbye to each other, he then asked me coldly and quite calmly not to forget his request, as if I had not spoken at all. I was furious!’²⁵

Michael, who normally recorded every meeting with Nicholas, made no mention in his diary of seeing him at Kamenets-Podolsky. He would not speak to him for another five months, and when next in Tsarskoe Selo, during a brief trip home in May 1916, he would not trouble to visit the Tsar’s Alexander Palace. However, he did bump into Alexandra. There was no enthusiasm on either side. He stopped for a moment, politely, then hurried on. Alexandra