Given this, Guchkov and Shulgin still thought that when they did arrive in Pskov, 170 miles away, their task would be to persuade Nicholas to abdicate. They expected a struggle.
The journey took them seven hours, so it was around 10 p.m. when their train pulled into the station and they were led across the tracks to the brightly-lit imperial carriages. Shown into a large saloon car, with a table set with
Shulgin suddenly felt uncomfortable, conscious that he was ‘unshaved, with a crumpled collar, in a business coat.’2 Then Nicholas came in, wearing a grey Circassian coat, his face calm. He gestured and the two delegates sat down.
For Guchkov it was an extraordinary moment: for months he had been planning a coup in which Nicholas would be arrested on his train and made to abdicate. In Guchkov’s mind he had pictured a scene not unlike the very one of which he was now part. It would have been two weeks later and there would have been no revolution, but otherwise there were uncanny resemblances between fact and ambition.
Yet Guchkov found himself curiously disconcerted as he faced Nicholas. He shook hands with him and sat down facing him across the polished tabletop. The Emperor — or past Emperor as he was now thought back in Petrograd — was sitting and leaning slightly back against the silken wall, his face blank and impenetrable. Guchkov, recovering his own composure, put his hand on his forehead as was his habit when speaking, and began his case, looking down rather than at Nicholas.3
As he did so, Ruzsky came in, bowed to Nicholas, and whispered to Shulgin to tell him ‘that the matter has been decided’. However, he said nothing to Guchkov, who continued talking until he had finished what he had come here to say.
Expecting an argument he was astonished when Nicholas calmly replied: ‘I have made the decision to abdicate the throne’.4 Guchkov glanced at Shulgin. On the journey to Pskov he had rehearsed what he would say, making notes, and working out with Shulgin how best to counter Nicholas’s rebuttal of their arguments. They expected a long night. Now, suddenly, it was all over.
The shock, in fact, was still to come. For after a pause Nicholas announced that he was abdicating not only for himself but for his son, and that he had therefore decided to name Michael as his successor.
Bewildered, Guchkov stared in disbelief. ‘But we had counted on the figure of the little Alexis Nikolaevich as having a softening effect on the transfer of power.’5 Replacing Nicholas with an innocent boy was the bedrock of their case for preserving the monarchy against those demanding a republic.
So why? Nicholas looked across the table. ‘I have come to the conclusion that, in the light of his illness, I should abdicate in my name and his name simultaneously, as I cannot be separated from him.’
He leaned forward to Guchkov, as if seeking understanding. ‘I hope you will understand the feelings of a father.’6
Fortunately for Nicholas — unfortunately for Russia — Guchkov still did not know of the earlier abdication cable, when Nicholas declared himself ready to abdicate provided that his son ‘can stay with me until he comes of age’, for had he done so he would have arrived in Pskov with a very different purpose. He would not have wasted his time in arguing for abdication, but rather concentrated on agreeing the terms under which Alexis, the new emperor, would remain in parental care for the next three years.
Nicholas could not abdicate twice. His first was binding on him— Ruzsky had a signed copy of that — and acceptance by the Duma Committee of some reasonable arrangement for Alexis’s care would suffice to dispose of any conditional element in his abdication. The principle that an offer once made cannot be withdrawn if its condition is met would have been sufficient for Guchkov to have refused to consider the removal of Alexis from the succession. His difficulty was that he did not know that there had been an offer. And Ruzsky, knowing nothing of the political significance of the issue in terms of the struggle going on at the Tauride Palace, chose to remain silent about it.
However, the fact was that while waiting for the two delegates from Pskov, Nicholas had started to brood about giving up his throne but losing his son at the same time — a prospect which he pondered in dismay. The thought of his beloved son torn from his family and handed over to strangers was too terrible to contemplate, though it was probably no better to think that he might be handed over to ‘Uncle Misha’ as Regent and ‘that woman’. A cynical view might well be that he also bitterly resolved that if ‘they don’t want me, then they won’t get my son’, but whatever was going through his tortured mind, he failed to recognise that what he was proposing was actually unlawful. The laws of succession drawn up and binding since the days of Tsar Paul I were designed to remove the right of one Emperor to choose or block the next.
Tsar Paul had good reason for introducing the law: his own mother, Catherine the Great, had intended to hand her throne to a grandson, not Paul, but died before that could be done. Previous sovereigns had also played fast and loose with the succession. No longer. Succession was to be by rank, not preference, and that was the law followed by the five emperors after Paul. There were to be no more palace coups.
This did not mean that an imbecile could demand the throne, for it was understood that someone clearly unfit to take the throne should not do so; however in ruling out such an heir there were independent procedures by which this should be shown to be in the interests of the nation, not merely an excuse based on the personal judgement of an Emperor.
Was Alexis unfit to become Emperor? The answer was No. Indeed, his parents had spent years hiding his illness from public knowledge so that when he did ascend the throne it would not be held against him. The issue here, never considered before, was separation. And that, in itself — while personally heart-breaking for his family — was not cause for ruling him out. After all, his brother as Regent was hardly likely to countenance such a course for his ailing nephew, and there had been no suggestion in the meetings at the Tauride Palace that removal of Alexis from his parents had been a condition of his inheritance.
Nevertheless that is what Nicholas in that afternoon of Thursday, March 2, decided would be the case, recklessly indifferent to the consequences for crown and country. To find excuse for his change of mind he called Professor Sergei Fedorov, the court physician to his carriage. Fedorov had always told him that Alexis’s haemophilia was incurable, and he repeated that fact now. But that was not what Nicholas wanted to know: his question was whether he thought Alexis would be allowed to remain with the family after his succession. The correct answer to that was surely that Fedorov could not know: he was not a politician, he was a doctor. Instead, probably because he knew what answer Nicholas was looking for, he told him that he doubted if Alexis would be allowed to remain with his parents.7 Where he could be more certain was that if separated, Alexis might not get the care he needed, given that his illness had been hidden from the world.
With that, Nicholas had the confirmation he needed to decide that he had sufficient cause for removing Alexis from the succession — contrary to the
Someone wondered if Michael’s marriage to a commoner was a problem? They had no idea, but there was mention that Alexander II had married a commoner, though he was already then Emperor and she was his second wife.8
As the minutes ticked by the group came to the view that they had no choice but to accept the manifesto as it stood. Every hour counted and neither Guchkov nor Shulgin relished the idea of returning empty-handed to Petrograd, of lamely going back to the Duma to discuss whether a double abdication was acceptable. As things stood they reckoned they had no choice: they would have to accept Alexis being bypassed, and Michael as Emperor. Filing back into the saloon they told Nicholas that they had agreed to his terms.
An abdication manifesto had been drafted earlier at
