The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

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The next day he returned with Michael. Meeting them in his study, Nicholas smoked, listened impassively, but seemed deaf to anything that Michael said as he tried in vain to impress upon his brother that without change he faced disaster. Sandro judged that they were ‘wasting his time and ours’ and when it came his turn to support Michael’s arguments he found by the end that ‘I was hardly able to speak…emotion choking me’.³

With that, Sandro gave up in despair. However, Michael told him he would try yet again, hopeless though it seemed, and on Friday February 10 — six days after coming back from the front — he drove once more to Tsarskoe Selo.⁴ The meeting in Nicholas’s study was as pointless as the earlier one, though it was interrupted by the arrival of Rodzyanko. Nicholas agreed to see him, and went out into the audience chamber.

Rodzyanko was standing with a report from the Duma which simply underlined the points which Michael and Sandro had been making, but ‘the Emperor listened not only with indifference but with a kind of ill-will’, recounted Rodzyanko. ‘He finally interrupted me with the request that I hurry a bit, as Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich was waiting for him to have a cup of tea.’⁵

Four days later Sandro wrote to his brother Nicholas about his depressing meetings at Tsarskoe Selo, and added that Michael ‘can also see no way out, except sending her to Livadia’⁶ — the imperial estate in the Crimea. Yet suddenly a week later there was a moment of hope that in fact Nicholas had been listening and had finally yielded to the arguments put to him that change was imperative. He told his prime minister Prince Golitsin that he was prepared to go to the Duma next day, Tuesday, February 22, and concede to the demands for a responsible ministry. But just as suddenly he changed his mind, and instead of going to the Tauride Palace he ordered his train and went off in the opposite direction — disappearing back to Stavka.

Next day Alexandra dashed off a letter to him, urging him as she had always urged him — ‘Be firm…’⁷

His reply showed a touch of irritation but also the extent of his own self-deception. ‘What you write about being firm — the master — is perfectly true. I do not forget it — be sure of that, but I need not bellow at the people right & left every moment. A quiet sharp remark or answer is enough very often to put the one or other in his place…’⁸

That would never be enough ever again.

THE revolution intended to come from above came instead from below and without any real warning. It was a spontaneous rising, with no master-plan or even a decisive leader who could be identified afterwards. Unrest become disturbance, disturbance grew into rebellion, and then in turn into revolution. And yet all this was in large part confined to the capital, with the rest of the country unaffected, at least in the beginning, and with some regions unaware of events until they were all over. The ostensible cause was fear of a bread shortage; although supplies were adequate the fear was self-fulfilling in that housewives hoarded, creating the shortage. But that was only one of many factors. There had been large-scales strikes, following a lock-out of workers at the giant Putilov factories, with an estimated 158,000 men idle by late February. Petrograd itself was a vast military camp, with 170,000 armed troops in barracks, many of them susceptible to agitators — among them German agents actively fermenting resentment in the hope of bringing about a revolution that would remove Russia from the war.

In Gatchina on Saturday February 25 — just three weeks after returning from the front — Michael noted that ‘there were disorders on Nevsky Prospekt today. Workmen were going about with red flags and throwing grenades and bottles at the police, so that troops had to open fire. The main cause of disorders is — lack of flour in the shops.’⁹ The day left six dead and some 100 injured.

But what was most alarming was that one of the dead was a police inspector who, intent upon seizing a red flag, was killed by a Cossack trooper as he rode into a crowd of demonstrators gathered around a statue of Alexander III in a square beside the Nicholas station, the main terminus for Moscow.¹⁰ The Cossacks were the traditional scourge of rioters and demonstrators — and if they were no longer reliable, no one was.

Next day, Sunday, there were placards all around the city, forbidding meetings or gatherings, with notices that troops were authorised to fire to maintain order. The crowds took no notice of these warnings and that evening Michael noted in his diary that ‘the disorders in Petrograd have gathered momentum. On the Suvorov Prospekt and Znamenskaya Street there were 200 killed.’¹¹

More ominously, a company of the elite Pavlovsk Guards had mutinied in their barracks, and when their colonel came into confront them he was attacked and his hand cut off.¹² With that, the mutineers had no way back: it was revolution or the hangman’s noose.

A desperate Rodzyanko telegraphed the Tsar. ‘The capital is in a state of anarchy. The government is paralysed…General discontent is growing. There is wild shooting in the street. In places troops are firing at each other.’ There must be a new government, under someone trusted by the country’, he urged as he had so often urged before, except that this time he warned that ‘any procrastination is tantamount to death…’¹³

Reading that, Nicholas dismissed it as panic. ‘Some more rubbish from that fat Rodzyanko’.¹⁴ However he did decide to put together a loyal force and despatch it to the capital, and to return to Tsarskoe Selo himself. That should settle matters. The rebel soldiers were no more than an armed rabble. They would never stand against proper frontline troops.

That complacent view was easier held in Mogilev than in the streets of Petrograd. The rebels indeed were not frontline soldiers but depot reservists, many of them new recruits, the scrapings of the military barrel. Their officers were mainly men convalescing after being wounded at the front, or young inexperienced subalterns fresh from the military academies. It was certain, observed the British military observer Colonel Alfred Knox, that ‘if the men went wrong, the officers were without the influence to control them’.¹⁵

Military discipline was a thin veneer which was easily stripped away, turning such troops into a uniformed mob. Nevertheless, they had guns and were as well-armed as any soldiers being sent to face them. By noon on Sunday, only some 24 hours into the disorders, 25,000 troops had gone over to the side of the demonstrators; however among the rest there were few willing to march out either for them or against them. The bulk of the available forces simply stayed in their barracks as the rebels and the mob took command of the streets.

The Arsenal on the Liteiny was captured, putting into the hands of the rebels thousands of rifles and pistols, and hundreds of machine-guns. The headquarters of the Okhrana, across the Neva and opposite the Winter Palace, as well as a score of police stations, were overrun and set on fire. The prisons were opened and their inmates freed, criminals as well as political detainees. By the evening of that second day, only the very centre of the city, around the Winter Palace, could be said still to be in government control.¹⁶

Michael would begin his diary entry for Monday, February 27, by writing that it was ‘the beginning of anarchy’.¹⁷

AS Michael was composing his diary, Nicholas was puffing on a cigarette in his quarters at Stavka, reading a letter newly arrived from Alexandra. Having told him that three of the children had gone down with measles, she was otherwise cheerful and confident about the events in the capital, for all around her agreed that it was nothing like as serious as the revolution of 1905, which had begun with a massacre of demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace on what history remembered as ‘Bloody Sunday’. The difference was ‘because all adore you & only want bread… it seems to me it will be alright — the sun shines so brightly.’ There was also the consolation of her prayers at the grave of Rasputin. ‘I felt such peace & calm on His dear grave — He died to save us.’¹⁸

Nicholas was also striving to be calm. The day before, in church, he had felt ‘an excruciating pain in the middle of my chest, which lasted for quarter of an hour. I cannot understand what it was, as I had no heart beating, but it came & left me at once when I knelt before the Virgin’s image.’¹⁹ Writing to say ‘how happy I am at the thought of meeting you in two days’ he then reported that ‘after the news of yesterday from town — I saw many faces here with frightened expressions.’ Not knowing that his chief of staff had been involved in a plot with Prince Lvov to get rid of him, he added: ‘Luckily Alekseev is calm…’²⁰

There was also reassuring news from the capital. Early that afternoon the war minister General Mikhail