Belyaev cabled Mogilev to tell Nicholas that while ‘it has not yet been possible to crush the rebellion… I am firmly convinced that calm will soon arrive. Ruthless measures are being adopted to achieve this. The authorities remain totally calm.’21 If he had written ‘totally panic-stricken’ it would have been nearer the mark, but Belyaev, appointed only seven weeks earlier, could not bring himself to admit that he had already lost control of the army in Petrograd.
At the Tauride Palace the Duma was in uproar. Just 13 days after its new session had begun, deputies arrived to find that the Duma had been shut down again. Prince Golitsin, the third prime minister in the past year and a reluctant appointee, had used a ‘blank’ decree to prorogue the Duma, thinking it would defuse tension by silencing the more radical elements.22
However, the deputies refused to disperse, adjourned to another chamber in the building, and set up a ‘temporary committee’ under the chairmanship of their president Rodzyanko. Within 24 hours this would claim to be the
That said, none of them had any idea of what their role could be.
So Rodzyanko then turned to the only man he thought could rescue them. He slipped out of the chamber and telephoned Michael in Gatchina, urging him to come to the capital immediately. The call would appear to have been around 3.45 p.m. for that was when Michael telephoned his brother-in-law Matveev at his embankment law office in Petrograd, only to be told that he had left at 3.30 p.m. and was on his way home to the Fontanka. Instead, Michael spoke to his chauffeur, telling him to be with a car at the Warsaw railway station just after six p.m. By the time Matveev was home, and telephoned Gatchina to find out what was happening, Natasha told him that Michael had already left for Petrograd with his secretary Nikolai Johnson.25 Their special train left at 5 p.m.
Just over an hour later they were at Petrograd’s Warsaw station, with Michael relieved to find that ‘things were comparatively quiet.’26 Met by Matveev’s chauffeur, he was whisked away to the Marie Palace on St Isaac’s Square to join an emergency conference attended by the prime minister, war minister Belyaev, Rodzyanko and other leading members of the Duma’s new ‘temporary committee’.
In the government there was only resigned defeatism. That evening the hated interior minister Protopopov had been persuaded to resign and as he shuffled off into the night he muttered that there was nothing now left to him ‘but to shoot myself’.27 No one cared what he did and no one bothered to say goodbye to the man so trusted by the Empress, so despised by the nation. Yet his departure was also its own signal that the government was no more. Golitsin accepted that his ministry was finished, but did not know how to write out the death certificate. He hoped Michael would do that for him.
There was not a moment to lose. As Michael would note afterwards, ‘By 9 p.m. shooting in the streets began and almost all the armed forces became revolutionary and the old rule ceased to exist.’28
So what was to be the new rule? In the conference which followed Rodzyanko would later claim that he urged Michael ‘to assume on his own initiative the dictatorship of the city… compel the personnel of the government to tender their resignations and demand by telegram, by direct wire from His Majesty, a manifesto regarding the formation of a responsible cabinet.’29 These were dramatic proposals: the Duma president — who had prided himself on refusing to be a rebel — was proposing that Michael should seize power, effectively proclaim himself Regent and present his brother with a
Rodzyanko would later claim to be dismayed that Michael refused to follow his advice, complaining that the ‘irresoluteness of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich contributed to a favourable moment being lost. Instead of taking active measures and gathering around himself the units of the Petrograd garrison whose discipline had not yet been shattered, the Grand Duke started to negotiate by direct wire with Emperor Nicholas II.’30
However, this picture of an ‘irresolute’ Michael and a decisive, ruthless and clear-headed Duma president depends on Rodzyanko’s own self-serving account, written long afterwards and published in 1922, when many of his contemporaries were revising their roles in the revolution of 1917. Rodzyanko was then anxious to rebut criticism that it was he who had proved irresolute and it is that which more easily explains his improbable scenario of February 27; it helped to excuse all that followed. In fact, as others would remark over these critical days, Rodzyanko was in ‘a blue funk’ with no idea of what to do.
What further coloured his account was that when it came to the choice of a new prime minister that evening, Michael nominated someone else for the post Rodzyanko believed was his by right. At Gatchina Michael had been more in touch with political opinion than Rodzyanko might have expected, and knew that the majority Progressive Bloc in the Duma had already opted for Prince Georgy Lvov. It was therefore his name which Michael put forward, and which the conference endorsed.
Lvov was not at the conference but he knew of the proposal to make him prime minister and had agreed to take the post if offered to him. Michael already knew that; Rodzyanko did not. Lvov was not a member of the Duma, though as long-time head of the powerful union of local authorities, the
Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Kadet party, and a powerful voice in the Duma, believed that the choice of Lvov was ‘made easier by his reputation everywhere in Russia; at the time he was irreplaceable. I cannot say, however, that Rodzyanko was reconciled to the decision.’31 Rodzyanko would still behave as if he were leader, but his real power died that night.
Nevertheless, the two-hour conference in the Marie Palace did adopt in a broad sense the measures of which Rodzyanko would later boast himself author. Michael would telegraph his brother and convey the proposals, supported as they were by his present prime minister, that he should act as Regent in the capital, with the power to appoint a new prime minister but one competent to choose his own Cabinet, unlike those which had gone before. With his high reputation in the army, Michael as lawful Regent was well-placed to win over the vast number of troops who had stayed in their barracks; a new ‘responsible ministry’ under a respected man at its rudder, would isolate the extremists behind the disorder. The real question, however, was whether the Tsar would accept any of this.
Michael had, of course, repeatedly pressed on his brother privately the necessity for a new responsible ministry, but this was the first time he would be saying so not only openly but as spokesman for the political leadership in Petrograd. He would wrap it up in the politest of language but his message to the Tsar would be clear: the days of autocracy were over.
The next four hours would be decisive. If Nicholas accepted the reality of the disaster confronting them all, there could be a new government by the next morning, with every chance that by the end of the day, with the majority of troops who had not left their barracks rallying to Michael, the revolutionaries would have slunk off into the night. Otherwise the revolution unchecked might prove impossible to contain.
Leaving the Marie Palace, Michael crossed the square to the nearby residence of the war minister on the Moika and there at 10.30 p.m. he began his despatch to his brother.32 He was using the Hughes apparatus, a kind of primitive telex, with a keyboard, in which one party typed out a tape and then waited for a reply tape. It was slow but it was all they had for communication over such a long distance. At the receiving end in Mogilev was the sympathetic chief-of-staff Alekseev and Michael ‘talked’ to his brother through him.
That in itself already said much. Michael, using a war ministry machine, quoting the support of the prime minister, was not in fact acting on his own behalf, but as representative voice of those the Tsar believed to be acting for him. It was a slap in the face. Michael went on:
