Six months is a long time, and if Russia won great victories in the summer, and the public mood improved, the picture could well look very different. Re-reading Michael’s manifesto then, what it actually said might be better understood. However, that appeared a vain hope in the immediate aftermath of its publication.
Some people would never forgive Michael for becoming Emperor but not being Emperor. Grand Duke George wrote to his wife that while ‘Misha’s manifesto seems to have calmed the republicans, the others are angry with him…’12 The right-wing Duma member Vasily Maklakov, who was not at Millionnaya Street, called the manifesto ‘strange and criminal… an act of lunacy or treason, had not the authors been qualified and patriotic lawyers.’13 In Tsarskoe Selo, Grand Duke Paul’s wife Princess Paley, damned Michael as ‘a feeble creature’ and ‘a weakling’,14 though there was no surprise in her saying that.
In short, in some quarters it would be Michael who would be blamed for the fall of the House of Romanov. ‘Not us’ they would cry, ‘it was him’.
One exception in Michael’s corner was A. A. Mossolov, former head of the Court Chancellery, who observed that when Michael ‘became Emperor, those Grand Dukes who were in Petrograd failed to rally around him’15. Bimbo apart, that was true, although the excuse would be that either they could not get near him that day, or they did not know where he was.
But in casting blame, the ultimate responsibility for all that happened lay with Nicholas, and above all, Alexandra.
Brooding over events in faraway Persia, Dimitri was in no doubt about that. ‘The final catastrophe,’ he judged, ‘has been brought about by the wilful and short-sighted obstinacy of a woman. It has, naturally, swept away Tsarskoe Selo, and all of us, at one stroke.’16
MICHAEL’S manifesto, in empowering the Provisional Government as lawful, also bound it to do what it promised to do, and which limited its role to that of restoring order, continuing the war, and exercising its powers only until such time as the Constituent Assembly determined the status of Russia. In particular it had no rights to pre-empt any decision reserved to the elected Assembly when it came into being.
So it seemed on March 3. The reality was very different. Michael did not surrender the Romanovs, the new government would do that for him, yielding to the clamouring pressures of the Soviet. There would be no place in the new order for Grand Dukes: their rank, privilege, wealth, land and even liberty were now at the disposal of a government in hock to the Soviet. The meeting at Millionnaya Street had not intended it, but long before any constituent assembly could come into being, the Romanovs would be out of business. Indeed, that seemed to be the case almost immediately, such was the weakness of the new government.
On his return to Gatchina Michael had assumed that he would continue with some role in the army, or at least do so when conditions allowed it. Technically he was still Inspector-General of Cavalry with the rank of colonel-general, but he was willing to serve in any capacity. He was to be immediately disappointed; there would be no job for him or any other Grand Duke.
‘They do not allow us to go the front fearing that we might start a counter-revolution,’ wrote Grand Duke George from Gatchina, though no such idea has ‘even crossed our minds.’17 Perhaps so, but in Petrograd the government knew that the Soviet would never believe that.
On April 5, one month after he signed his manifesto, Michael noted with scarcely concealed bitterness: ‘Today I received my discharge from military service,’ adding caustically ‘with uniform’.18 It was another pointer to the way reality had overtaken the meeting at Millionnaya Street.
Next day, Michael and Natasha, together with cousin George, went by train to Petrograd, Michael’s first visit to the capital since his manifesto. There was no imperial carriage now; they would have to travel like everyone else, buying tickets, and finding seats where they could. They were intent on organising the removal of his furniture from his mother’s home at the Anichkov Palace before it was ‘liberated’ by the workers.19 It would be the first and only time that Natasha would ever set foot in the palace in which Michael had been born 38 years earlier.
As Michael settled down in his carriage at Gatchina, ‘a soldier came running to the compartment in which Misha sat by the window, and taking off his military fur cap, made a deep bow’. At the same station, a group of soldiers stood to attention as Grand Duke George came up to them. ‘They seemed delighted to talk to me,’ he wrote. ‘I could do anything with these soldiers who now want a republic with a Tsar!’20
For a Grand Duke to think it worth mentioning that soldiers had stood to attention when he approached them, or that one had bowed to Michael, was a measure of just how greatly discipline had deteriorated in the army over the past month. The cause of the collapse in ordinary standards was not the revolution itself, but the notorious Order No 1 which had been issued by the Petrograd Soviet on March 1 before the formation of the Provisional Government. Intended at the time to apply only to the Petrograd garrison, the ‘order’ had become widely interpreted as applying to all troops, including those in the front-line.
Guchkov, war minister in the new government, found out about Order No 1 only after it was published and he had failed to get it rescinded. On March 9, just a week after taking up his post, he had cabled Alekseev in Mogilev: ‘The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that this is permitted by the Soviet…in the military department it is possible at present to issue only such orders as basically do not contradict the decisions of the above-mentioned Soviet.’21
The effect was disastrous, for it essentially made officers subservient to the dictates of ‘soldier committees’ established in every military formation, which took away the control of arms from officers, and in some instances dictated what military action might, or might not, be taken against the enemy.
Off-duty soldiers were to be treated as civilians, with no requirement to salute or stand to attention; officers were ‘prohibited’ from speaking to soldiers ‘rudely’. In some units, ‘soldier committees’ insisted on electing their own officers, and expelling those they judged to be too strict or who were suspected of wanting to get on with the war. No wonder, then, that there was no place in this new ‘democratic people’s army’ for Michael or any other Grand Duke, including ‘Uncle Nikolasha’, reappointed Supreme Commander by Nicholas before he abdicated. The new government had simply sacked him.22
Paleologue estimated that there were well over a million deserters roaming Russia. ‘Units have been turned into political debating societies,’ reported the British military observer Alfred Knox after a tour of the northern front. Front-line infantry refused to allow the artillery to shoot at the enemy in case the enemy shot back, and fraternised daily with the Germans facing them. As for the troops in Petrograd, ‘the tens of thousands of able-bodied men in uniform who saunter about the streets without a thought of going to the front…will be a disgrace for all-time to the Russian people and its government’.23
Michael thought the same, and said so in a letter to a British friend, Major Simpson. ‘I want you to know that I am very much ashamed of my countrymen, who are showing too little patriotism ever since the revolution, and who are forgetting their agreement with the Allies, who have done so much to help them. But nonetheless I hope that the return of their good feelings will prevent them becoming traitors.’24
One consolation for Michael was that his own Savage Division had remained immune to the breakdown in discipline. Officers and men were as rock-steady after the revolution as they had been before. He would also have been proud to know that when an officer returned from Petrograd to his Muslim regiment, he found that ‘one question seemed to interest the men most — the fate of Grand Duke Michael’. When he replied that he was in Gatchina and that he was ‘safe for the moment’ the men would shake their heads and mumble, ‘Allah preserve him — he is a real
SITTING in Michael’s house, Grand Duke George decided that he could no longer stand living in this new Russia. He had accepted the emergence of the new government ‘but what he had seen after that,’ he wrote to his wife in England, ‘is enough to make your hair stand on end. I would like to leave the country at once.’ He was also tiring of Gatchina: ‘Misha is so nice but his wife is so vengeful about the Romanovs’. 26 George was not sure how much more he could take of her outbursts.
His natural hope was that he would go to England, where his wife, the daughter of the late King George of Greece, had been stranded since the outbreak of war. Accordingly, three weeks after the new government came into being, he went to see Buchanan to seek permission to travel to England.
Although he was not directly connected to the British royals, his wife Marie was a niece of the Dowager Queen Alexandra, as was Michael. So, in the hope of increasing his chances, he told Buchanan that Michael was
