The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

Assembly, whose elections will take place in six months. God knows who gave him the idea of signing such rubbish.⁴¹

Given the wreckage which he had mindlessly left behind him and the impossible position in which he had placed his brother, his effrontery had an epic quality about it. Certainly, when he said much the same to his brother-in-law Sandro a few days later, Sandro confessed himself to be ‘speechless’.⁴²

But what, finally, did Michael wearily say himself of that day as he prepared to retire to his makeshift bed? His diary entry for that Friday, March 3, was breathtaking in its brevity.

At 6 a.m. we were woken up by the telephone. It was a message from the new Minister of Justice Kerensky. It stated that the complete Council of Ministers would come to see me in an hour’s time. But actually they arrived only at half-past nine a.m…⁴³

And that was all, from the man who had woken up that morning thinking he was Regent, and went to bed having been proclaimed Emperor.

16. RETREAT TO GATCHINA

MICHAEL left Millionnaya Street next morning, Saturday March 4, at eleven o’ clock, the first time he had set foot outside the apartment for four days. The previous afternoon, while waiting for the final draft of his manifesto, he had sent off a courier with a hastily-pencilled note to Natasha to tell her that he expected to return next morning. ‘Awfully busy and extremely exhausted,’ he had scribbled. ‘Will tell you many interesting things. I kiss you tenderly. All yours, Misha.’¹

There was certainly no point in remaining in Petrograd. He had no further role to play, and was not likely to have one until and if a constituent assembly decided to support a constitutional monarchy, and that could not be for several months hence. The new government had its mandate, and needed no more. In essence, Russia now had a caretaker government and a caretaker emperor in a caretaker monarchy.

As Michael left the apartment and stepped out on to the landing, the first sight to greet him was as a surprising as it was agreeable. Lining the staircase leading down to the street was a guard of honour made up of the officers and cadets stationed in the building. There was an order to present arms and as Michael, saluting, walked down the stairs and outside into his waiting car, a cry of ‘Long Live Russia’.²

But what might follow? Would there be hostile demonstrations at the station, agitators demanding his arrest, as the Soviet executive had done only yesterday? Michael’s manifesto, or rather the gloss the Provisional Government had put on it, was sufficient to strike out the Soviet threats against Michael, though not against his brother; passions were calmed and instead, Michael found himself going home in something akin to triumph.

Followed by another car filled with armed cadets, he and Johnson were driven off to board a special train arranged for them at the Baltic station. Joined by General Yuzefovich, his old chief of staff, he stepped out of his car and into a station ‘overcrowded with soldiers…everywhere were machine-guns and boxes of ammunition’. Flanked by his armed escort he walked to his waiting train and to another reception of the kind he had not expected. ‘A military detachment was lined up by my carriage and I greeted them, and a gathered crowd cheered me.’³

The scene at the Baltic station, with saluting mutineers and applauding bystanders, was not without its irony. Here was its own evidence that the manifesto drafted at Millionnaya Street had served its purpose, at least in the short term. His ‘abdication’ — perception being nine-tenths of politics — had put an end to the revolution. Now Michael was being hailed, not hunted, and if Lvov, Kerensky and the others had been present at his departure, it would have given them immense satisfaction. ‘It seems that order in general is being established’, he would write that night in his diary.⁴

The previous evening, in explanation of his manifesto, he had told Princess Putyatina that it would ‘calm the passions of the populace, make the soldiers and workers who had mutinied see reason, and re-establish the shattered discipline of the army.’⁵ He said much the same on his return to Gatchina on Saturday afternoon. Bimbo’s brother George, still taking refuge in Nikolaevskaya Street, wrote afterwards that Michael feared that if he were to reign as Emperor ‘without knowing the wishes of the country, matters will never calm down’.⁶

For the moment, however, he was simply glad to be home and away from the madness of Petrograd. It was hard to credit everything that had happened since he had set off for the capital only five days earlier, when his brother was Emperor and Supreme Commander in Mogilev, and he had gone to the Marie Palace to discuss what could be done with a government that had vanished that same night. Five days? It seemed a lifetime.

Inevitably Natasha, thrilled to have him back safely, would pour scorn on Nicholas. The excuse so often had been that he was doing Alexandra’s bidding, but she had not been at Pskov and had no hand in the decision to bypass Baby. How could he have been so stupid, so selfish, so blind to the consequences? There was no answer to that, and never would be. How different everything would have been — for the wider world, as it turned out, not just Russia — if Michael had come home that weekend as Regent, not as the newspapers were announcing, as ex-Emperor. Natasha could clench her fists in rage, but there was nothing that could be done about it. Nicholas had ruined the Romanovs and in ruining them had ruined Russia.

OFF the streets that week because of strikes, the Petrograd newspapers returned with their first reports of the dramatic events of the past few days. With only one notable exception — Milyukov’s Kadet party newspaper Rech — they presented Michael’s abdication in the way the government intended. Nicholas’s manifesto was followed immediately by Michael’s, their intentional juxtaposition helping the headlines which linked both as equal abdications.

In four newspapers — Birzhevye Vedomosti, Den, Petrogradsky Listok, and Petrogradskaya Gazeta — the headlines were identical: ‘Abdication of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich’.⁷ There was nothing in the text itself to justify that, but the accompanying statement by the Provisional Government included the word ‘abdication’ and that in turn justified the headlines over the manifesto. Eyes glazed over the lawyer-speak below, their minds already made up by the headlines.

From ‘abdication’ grew the assumption, fed by triumphant Soviet propaganda, that the monarchy was finished. Even the British and French ambassadors seemed to think in consequence that Russia was now a republic. Both were to be corrected by Milyukov, the new foreign minister. ‘The Constituent Assembly alone will be qualified to change the political status of Russia’, he told Paleologue;⁸ and when he heard Buchanan referring to the new government as republican, ‘he caught me up, saying that it was only a Provisional Government pending the decision of the future Constituent Assembly’.⁹

Correcting the impression gathered by two experienced and senior ambassadors was one thing; it was quite another with the country at large. Michael had been wasting his time at the school desk it seemed. What he had signed was not his suspension of imperial power until the decision of a future constituent assembly, but his abdication. What was intended as temporary was taken as permanent. Everyone knew that, because it said so in the newspapers. Some people, reading the manifesto, would say that he had ‘refused the crown’ rather than abdicated, but the effect was the same. Michael had given up.

There were exceptions to this generally negative response. In The Times of London, for example, the judgement of Robert Wilton, their respected correspondent in Petrograd, was that ‘perhaps in the end it will be all for the best’. Accepting that while ‘at present we must be content to go on with the Provisional Government until quieter days supervene,’ he concluded that were it possible to bring about the Constituent Assembly ‘there could be little doubt as to the election of Grand Duke Michael to the Throne by an overwhelming majority’.¹⁰ Following events in Yalta, Princess Cantacuzene took much the same view — ‘we looked forward to the probability of the Constituent Assembly being in favour of a constitutional monarchy’.¹¹

Besides, as Michael might wryly have reflected, the idea of having his succession confirmed by being ‘elected’ was exactly how the Romanov dynasty came into being. The first Romanov, his namesake Michael I, had been elected by a national assembly in 1613. After 300 years, a second ‘election’ of a second Michael would change the Romanovs from autocrats into constitutional monarchs, like the British. No one on March 3, 1917 could know that a future assembly would vote to retain the monarchy, but equally no one could know that it would not.