The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

The room had been prepared to provide an informal setting. The settees and armchairs were arranged so that Michael, when he took the meeting, would be sitting in a tall-backed easy chair, facing a semicircle of delegates. Within fifteen minutes or so there were a dozen men gathered there. Seven of them were ministers in the newly-named Provisional Government and five were Duma deputies, led by Rodzyanko.

Before the meeting it had been agreed at the Tauride Palace that Lvov and Rodzyanko would lead the majority call for Michael’s abdication, while Milyukov argued the minority view, that preserving the monarchy was essential if Russia was to be saved from extremism.

However, the great division between the two sides was that unless Michael did abdicate, none of those opposed to his succession would remain in the government. That left Milyukov in the position where he could make only a token defence of the monarchy. And if Michael refused to abdicate, he would find himself only with a foreign minister and — assuming Guchkov arrived in time to join in the meeting — war minister. The prime minister and the other seven ministers present would all resign; Rodzyanko, nominally still president of the State Duma, had promised not to take office in any replacement government.

However, as Rodzyanko would blandly comment that morning, the decision none the less would be one for Michael alone. Small wonder, then, that the majority of men in that drawing room were confident of being back in the Tauride Palace by not later than noon. What choice could Michael have but abdicate, abandoned otherwise by the new government and surrounded by mutinous troops who wanted him dead?

At 9.35 a.m., with the delegates deciding that they could no longer wait for Guchkov and Shulgin, Matveev was told that they were ready to begin.¹⁹ The drawing room door opened, ministers and deputies rose to their feet, and in walked the man being hailed across the country as His Majesty Emperor Michael II. He moved around the room to greet each delegate individually. ‘We shook hands and exchanged courtesies,’ Kerensky would remember.²⁰

Then Michael sat down in his tall-backed chair, looked around the men facing him, and the meeting began.

15. PLAYING FOR TIME

ONLY a couple of hours earlier, Michael had expected a meeting in which he would have been sitting in his chair as Regent, not as Emperor, for taking the crown was a possibility he had never considered, though neither had anyone else other than his brother after he decided that ‘a father’s feelings’ came before everything else in deciding the fate of Russia. Michael was still struggling to come to terms with that, for removing Alexis from the succession was so contrary to every ambition hitherto held for him that it hardly seemed credible. Alexandra had been obsessed with ‘Baby’s rights’, had fought like a tigress to protect them, and had brought Russia to the brink of ruin in consequence. Now, in a moment, Alexis had been swept aside.

But could Nicholas do that? It was not a question which bothered the troops and people cheering Michael’s name across the country that morning, and in the midst of a great war and civil unrest, what mattered to them more was that the hated Nicholas had gone, along with the reviled government of Alexandra’s lackeys.

There were many in the army who welcomed Michael on his own merits, and among the people at large those who knew of Michael approved, and among those who knew only his name, there was nothing they had heard to his discredit. Married not to a foreign princess but to a commoner from Moscow? If anything, that was reassurance, at least for those who were not committed republicans, that Russia would now have a new kind of monarchy and a constitutional Tsar who understood the concerns of the ordinary man-in-the-street.

If those relief forces which Nicholas had so confidently ordered to the capital had actually arrived, and the revolutionaries in the Tauride Palace had been driven out, then the frightened men of the Duma might have emerged as heroes, rather than cowards. But the troops had been turned back when Nicholas had been stopped, literally, in his tracks, and the battalion of heroes sent to Tsarskoe Selo had also turned back, for much the same reason. He wasn’t there. He was on a train trundling back to Pskov, and he would not arrive back at Stavka until 8.20 that Friday evening.¹ Once again, in the midst of a crisis, he had vanished, leaving chaos in his wake.

The problem was not therefore whether Michael ought to be Emperor, but that he was, and as such the Petrograd Soviet and the frightened mutineers who gave them the only military power available in the capital, were joined together in their determination to get rid of him — the first, because it would destroy the monarchy, and the second because it would save them from the gallows. In turn, that decided matters for the new government. Michael had to go, and the question of whether his succession was lawful or not was of no account. He was the Emperor, and there was nothing that could be done about that. It was reality.

What was also reality was that when Michael began the meeting he was to find that everyone addressed him not as ‘Your Imperial Majesty’ but as ‘Your Highness’ — thus, not as Emperor but as Grand Duke. That had been a collective decision before the meeting: that they would signal their determination for his departure by using the title he would use after his abdication, rather than his title before he signed such a manifesto. It was intended as intimidation, and they thought it would also speed up the clock.

Michael made no comment about the form of address, though he could not but note it and understand the reason behind it. The majority of men were not here to support him. Looking around the room he could see that they were exhausted, unshaven, bedraggled and, as Prince Lvov would put it, unable even to think straight any more.² Kerensky would admit that he himself had been ‘near collapse’. At dawn the previous day he had walked back to his apartment at 29 Tverskaya, and had fallen into bed, lying there for two or three hours in a ‘semi-delirious state’ for that was the only rest he had managed in the past five days.³ Milyukov was so exhausted that he ‘was falling asleep where he sat…He would start, open his eyes, then begin to sleep again’.⁴

In some cases it was not exhaustion but terror that marked the faces of the men from the Duma. Dread of the Soviet would be the recurring theme of the morning’s discussions, and that fear would be heightened by Kerensky, the only man in the room who could claim to speak for the mob.

Kerensky, a master of the theatrical posture, would convince some there that he also was ‘terrified’ and that at any moment a gang of armed men might break in and murder the new Emperor, if not the rest of them.⁵

Fear was a weapon, and it was the principal weapon which Rodzyanko would use that morning. As he had done in his wires to Pskov and Mogilev he drew a black picture of the world outside the windows, where civil war loomed and a bloodbath threatened. Although as terrified as anyone else, he would forget that when writing from the safety of his memoirs; he would prefer history to believe that the only man fearing for his life that day at Millionnaya Street was Michael himself.

It was quite clear to us that the Grand Duke would have reigned only a few hours, and that this would have led to colossal bloodshed in the precincts of the capital, which would have degenerated into general civil war. It was clear to us that the Grand Duke would have been killed immediately, together with all adherents, for he had no reliable troops at his disposal then, and could not sustain himself by armed support. The Grand Duke asked me outright whether I could guarantee his life if he acceded to the throne, and I had to answer in the negative.⁶

This was self-serving nonsense. Rodzyanko was in no position to guarantee anyone’s life, including his own, and certainly there was never reason for Michael, with Russia’s two highest military honours pinned to his chest, to look to the quaking Rodzyanko for protection. He was better off with the cadets downstairs. However, Rodzyanko lived to write his memoirs and Michael did not.

Milyukov, with Guchkov not yet arrived, was the sole spokesman for those who believed that Rodzyanko and Lvov were leading the government to ultimate ruin, as would prove the case. Rousing himself, he argued that it would be immeasurably more difficult in the long term if the established order was simply abandoned, for in his reasoning the ‘frail craft’ of the self-elected Provisional Government, without a monarch, would soon be sunk ‘in the ocean of national disorder’.⁷

As he advanced his case the combative Milyukov found himself fighting against a babble of angry voices; all idea of a measured debate had been swept away in a torrent of noisy argument. To latecomer Shulgin, now arrived with Guchkov, ‘Milyukov seemed unwilling, or unable to stop talking…This man, usually so polite and self-