treated with special consideration on the insistence of the ‘old school’ Duma deputies. It would be a brief respite.
Kerensky found him in Rodzyanko’s room. ‘In a corner sat a very old gentleman, with exceedingly long whiskers. He wore a fur coat, and looked like a gnome.’ Kerensky, noting that he had taken the trouble to hang round his neck the Order of St Andrew, refused to be impressed. ‘In the name of the revolutionary people I declare you under arrest’, he shouted.19 Rodzyanko, faced with this challenge to his own authority as leader of the Duma committee, backed down helplessly. Two soldiers led away the confused and crestfallen old Goremykin to join the others.
Kerensky was everywhere. ‘I was summoned and sent for from all sides. As in a trance, regardless of day or night…I rushed about the Duma. Sometimes I almost lost consciousness for fifteen or twenty minutes until a glass of brandy was forced down my throat and I was made to drink a cup of black coffee.’20
Kerensky would become more and more excitable as the hours and days passed. Nabokov, seeing him for the first time, was struck by his ‘loss of emotional balance’. He was also astonished when Kerensky, coming out of one meeting ‘excited, agitated, hysterical,’ put up his hands, grabbed the corners of his wing collar, and ripped them off,’ achieving a deliberately proletarian look, instead of that of a dandy’.21
His power, nevertheless, was enormous for there was no doubting among the Duma deputies that the new Soviet, with a thousand members milling around the Tauride Palace, was master if it chose to be. Kerensky was the bridge between two rivals in an uneasy coalition, and for the Duma members he was a bridge they could not afford to cross. The Temporary Committee of the Duma had the better claim to government, but its members knew that in this revolution they could only lead where Kerensky was willing to follow.
TRAPPED in Millionnaya Street, Michael knew little that day of events in the world aside. After a few restless hours on a settee, he was awakened by ‘the noise of heavy traffic and movement of cars and lorries filled with soldiers who were shooting mainly in the air and there were also explosions of hand-grenades. The soldiers shouted and cheered, waved red flags and had red ribbons and bows on their breasts and buttonholes’.22
Peering cautiously out from the apartment windows, Michael guessed from the jubilation of the troops driving by that there was no longer any resistance in the capital. There had been fierce fighting that morning around the Admiralty building until the last of the loyal troops, holed up there since the evacuation of the Winter Palace at 5 a.m., surrendered after warnings that the guns of the St Peter and St Paul Fortress would be turned on them.23 Thereafter the streets belonged to the revolution and the head-hunting gangs seeking out policemen, and anyone deemed ‘a traitor’ to the revolution.
One target was Grand Duke Andrew’s mistress Kschessinska. In the depths of winter, when the fuel depots were empty and people freezing in their homes, four military lorries, laden with sacks of coal, had arrived at her mansion on Kammenny-Ostrov Prospekt.24 To the mob, she was not an admired ballet star but the pampered recipient of blatant imperial favours, and a profiteer in arms deals. A vengeful crowd therefore descended on her house and sacked it from top to bottom. Kschessinska, forewarned, fled the house just in time, dressed like a peasant and with a shawl over her head, but not before remembering to pack a small suitcase with the most valuable of her jewels.25
At the nearby Astoria Hotel, a mob stormed in, after claiming that shots had been fired from there, and wrecked it. British and French officers staying there — military observers attached to the Russian army — were left alone, and indeed one was astonished to find himself being saluted as rebel troops ran up the staircase in search of Russians hiding in their rooms. Many of these, women as well as men, were dragged away as ‘prisoners of the revolution’, their fate uncertain.26
For Michael it was galling to think what might have been, if his brother had given him the free hand he had requested. Now there was no authority, no rallying point for those who would have welcomed the chance to turn the tables on the lawless mob rampaging throughout the capital. Where was the relief force so confidently promised by Nicholas? There was no sign among the celebrating rebels that they feared their arrival, and since the telephones were not working Michael could not contact anyone to find out what had happened to them. There was therefore nothing to do but sit tight and wait out the day. Fortunately their luck held. The bands searching the city for prisoners, not knowing that Michael was in 12 Millionnaya Street, left the building alone. ‘The day passed peacefully and no one bothered us’, he wrote that evening in his diary.27
Next morning, Wednesday March 1, there was cause for alarm when a squad of uniformed men broke into the apartment above, the home of the Procurator of the Holy Synod, and dragged him away shouting that he was ‘under arrest’. In the house next door, an old general, Baron Staekelberg, defended his home for hours against a gang of soldiers and sailors, and when they broke in they lynched his servant and killed the general, hauling his body to the Neva and throwing it in.28
Fortunately, local telephone lines in central Petrograd began to be restored during that morning and at last Michael was able to call out. Johnson spoke to Rodzyanko and told him where they were. An armed guard of five officers and 20 cadet officers was swiftly organised and despatched to Millionnaya Street as protection. By noon the apartment was secured, the armed sentries at the doors explaining themselves to any roving bands passing by that they were ‘acting on the orders of the Temporary Committee of the Duma’.29 The officers and cadets were housed in the study and in the empty flat below; with their arrival the building was thereafter left untouched.
With that, Michael was back in business. He had scribbled a note to Natasha that ‘our brains are wide- awake and the order of the day is to find a way of contacting representatives where we are renting an estate’ — a reference to their English property and thus code for the British ambassador Buchanan.30
As visitors now began to arrive, a courier was found to get that message to a fretting Natasha so that she would know where he was. Among those who sped to Millionnaya Street was a lawyer, Nikolai Ivanov, an aide of Rodzyanko, who brought with him an ‘imperial manifesto’ which he wanted Michael to sign. This promised a constitutional monarchy as soon as the war ended, and immediate recall of the Duma and the formation of a government ‘that enjoys the trust of the country’.31 The busy Ivanov had already secured the signatures of Grand Dukes Paul and Kirill, and in so doing Rodzyanko hoped that it would also prove to be to his personal advantage, with he, and not Prince Lvov, emerging as prime minister.
The manifesto, drafted by Rodzyanko and Ivanov, was to be credited to Paul; he had already shown it to Alexandra, though predictably she had greeted it with her usual scorn. ‘Paul has worked out some idiotical manifesto about a constitution after the war,’ she wrote to Nicholas, in a letter, which would reach him when it no longer mattered.32 Nevertheless, to Rodzyanko it appeared to offer one last chance to seize back the initiative, as he canvassed supporting signatories. If this was endorsed by the family — a Grand Duke’s manifesto — it might well persuade even Nicholas that he no option other than to sign it.
Michael agreed to add his name. It met the immediate necessity of a new start under a new style of government, and if the family were to unite behind that, then it might offer hope of some last-minute reprieve for his brother. Expecting Nicholas to be back in Tsarskoe Selo that evening, and the promised arrival of his relief force, Michael was determined to meet him and plead yet again for a new start for Russia. A Grand Duke’s manifesto could only help his arguments. Looking on the bright side, he wrote to Natasha to say that if Nicholas did accept it, ‘Russia’s new existence will begin’.33
That afternoon the British ambassador Buchanan turned up at the apartment, and agreed that the new manifesto might just save Nicholas’s throne. Michael told him that he had ‘repeatedly urged the Emperor to grant reforms, but in vain, and that he greatly regretted that Nicholas ‘had not done spontaneously what he would now have to do by force.’34
Buchanan, knowing that Michael was planning to see Nicholas that night in Tsarskoe Selo — but equally unaware that the Tsar was now heading in the opposite direction, to Pskov— asked him ‘to beseech the Emperor, in the name of King George, to sign the manifesto, to show himself to his people and to effect a complete reconciliation with them’. Michael agreed to press his brother to do so.35
Yet quite how Michael was to get to Tsarskoe Selo, with the mobs in control of the streets, was another matter. However, both assumed that Rodzyanko could provide the necessary security and that the Duma men in the Tauride Palace had more control than they actually possessed. Rodzyanko had said as much, for unless Michael did hand over the manifesto to Nicholas, it was not worth the paper it was written on — as almost immediately would prove to be the case.
