was exceptionally crowded this Friday morning. Officers of the guard were sleeping in the study and Michael, his brother-in-law Matveev and Johnson were sleeping on settees and makeshift beds. Matveev had brought in fresh shirts and underwear since Michael had arrived in Millionnaya Street with only the clothes they were standing up in.
Johnson took the call from Kerensky and learned only that the ‘Council of Ministers’ would be arriving for a meeting in about an hour. Michael was not surprised for they were expecting formal news of Nicholas’s abdication; but as Matveev would firmly record, ‘in the light of the letter from the President of the State Duma Rodzyanko’ delivered the evening before, they assumed that the delegation was coming ‘to report on the Regency’. While they waited, Michael was ‘therefore thinking over his appropriate reply expressing his consent’.10
The telephone call that ought to have been made to Millionnaya Street that morning would not have been at 5.55 but some two hours earlier, or just after 3 a.m. At Tsarskoe Selo that was the time that the garrison commander first tried to call Grand Duke Paul to tell him about the manifesto just received from Pskov; he thought it best if it was Paul who broke the news to Alexandra. Because he could not get through, an officer was sent to his palace. Paul came down in his dressing gown, and an artillery colonel, with a large red bow on his chest, read them the text of Nicholas’s abdication. ‘We realised at once that all was finished’, said Paul’s wife Princess Paley.11
Paul, in the event, could not bring himself to go to the Alexander Palace until 11 a.m. There he found Alexandra in her hospital uniform, still unaware that she was no longer Empress. After Paul told her what had happened, tears rolled down her cheeks, and she bent her head as if praying. ‘If Nicky has done that, it is because he had to do so…God will not abandon us… As it is Misha who is Emperor, I shall look after my children and my hospital. We shall go to the Crimea.’12
That Alexandra would not know of the abdication until mid-morning was understandable; that the new Emperor was not formally told as soon as the news reached Petrograd was astonishing. The silence was deliberate.
One reason why the new government was anxious that Michael should not know about the manifesto making him Emperor was that they did not want him better prepared than they were when eventually they did meet him. Kerensky would later gloss over the details of his telephone call to Millionnaya Street, but he would say of Michael that ‘we did not know how much he knew’ while adding that it was important ‘to prevent whatever steps he was planning to take until we had come to a decision’.13
Whatever steps? There was only one action that Michael would have taken had he found out independently that he had been named Emperor, and that would have been to telephone Prince Lvov at the Tauride Palace and summon him to Millionnaya Street, with doubtless a few others, but not the entire Committee. The problem then is that he would have been asking the awkward questions, and Prince Lvov would not have had the answers.
If Milyukov, leader of the largest bloc in the Duma had insisted on accompanying Lvov to such a meeting — after all, Lvov was a man he had championed — that could have been awkward for those at the Tauride Palace who, led by Kerensky but also ‘blue funk’ Rodzyanko, were now more concerned about saving the new Provisional Government and themselves than saving the monarchy.
At 6 a.m. Kerensky, after his brief telephone call to Millionnaya Street, knew that Michael had not been told independently about the manifesto. Saying that the delegation would be with him in about an hour was more hope than reality. The hope was that the delegation, the majority of them already defeatist on the issue of the manifesto, could be with Michael before he had a chance to find out he was Emperor. The streets would be dark, the city scarcely awake, and with luck they could browbeat a stunned Michael into surrender before the Soviet had time to start browbeating them.
However, he had reckoned without Milyukov’s resistance to any
With no sign of Guchkov and Shulgin, held up by their adventures in the railway workshops, Milyukov could not delay the delegation any longer and by 9.15 a.m. it began to assemble in Millionnaya Street — later than Kerensky had hoped, but still time enough to believe they could be back triumphant in the Tauride Palace by noon. Michael, they accepted, must have heard the news that he was Emperor — since it was all round the city by now — but he would have had no time to think out what that entailed. He would also be alone, in a room packed with men determined in the main to get rid of him. How could they lose?
MICHAEL had found out that he was Emperor in the time in which he had been waiting to meet the delegation as Regent. The telephones were working, and as the news spread across the capital the line into Millionnaya Street was blocked with calls. Natasha, in Gatchina, could still not get through to Petrograd, but the local telephone system there was working as normal — there were 250 numbers on the Gatchina exchange — and that Friday morning her phone ‘never stopped ringing’ her daughter Tata remembered.14
That was hardly surprising: the garrison commandant in Gatchina had his copy of the cabled manifesto at 3 a.m., the same time as at Tsarskoe Selo, and woke up the house to tell Natasha that she was now wife of the Emperor. The excitement was matched by the frustration at not being able to contact Michael, and find out what was going on in Petrograd.
The only personal caller at Millionnaya Street as the capital awoke that Friday morning was Bimbo, Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, who lived in the palace across the road. Two evenings before, Bimbo — whose brother George was staying with Natasha — had joined Michael for supper,15 discussing his role as Regent, and as ever advancing his own liberal ideas on the shape of the monarchy to come. He returned early on Friday morning, for Princess Putyatina remembered him being there. Someone had called him with the news already racing around Petrograd. He was ‘up-to-date with everything and he knew that the Emperor had abdicated’, she wrote. According to her version, Bimbo said that ‘I am very happy to recognise you as Sovereign, since in fact you are already the Tsar! Be brave and strong: in this way you will not only save the dynasty but also the future of Russia!’16
In the excitement of the moment the princess did not recall Michael being in any way alarmed at developments before the first knock on the door announced the arrival of his prime minister Prince Lvov, and a quivering Rodzyanko. Putyatina, writing many years later, clearly failed to pick up or chose to forget the worries Michael had with that news. He had once been heir to the throne, and co-Regent with Alexandra for the baby Alexis. He was well versed in the laws of succession, for they had been drilled into him by constitutional experts at the time, and what he knew — as perhaps Bimbo, 24th in line to the throne when Alexis was born, ought also to have known— was that Nicholas could not bypass Alexis as he had done. There was no precedent for it, and it had left Michael in a very difficult position. It would be the reason why, when he did meet the delegation, that Kerensky remarked that he looked ‘much perturbed’ 17
TWO miles separate the Tauride Palace and Millionnaya Street. On snow-covered streets a car could make the journey in about ten or fifteen minutes, driving down the street towards the Winter Palace, then turning into the archway leading to the large inner courtyard behind the Putyatin apartment. Once inside the courtyard the several cars arriving from the Duma building would be concealed from view as the cadet guards closed the heavy black courtyard doors behind them. The delegation had not told the Soviet executive about the meeting, and did not want them to have wind of it until afterwards, when they would be able to trump their protests by flourishing Michael’s signed abdication.
Matveev, wearing his uniform as a reserve lieutenant in the Zemstovs Hussars,18 was given the role of meeting the arriving delegates. The well of the staircase was crowded with armed cadet officers, and the Duma men threw off their fur coasts there before climbing the shallow-stepped granite staircase, with its elaborate wrought-iron bannister, to the apartment landing and the waiting Matveev. They were then ushered into the drawing room, warmed by a roaring fire.
