18. KERENSKY’S CAPTIVE
THREE weeks later, on Monday, August 21, Michael stayed at home while Natasha, with Johnson as escort, went off by train to Petrograd. Shopping, with lunch afterwards at the Astoria? He preferred a stroll around the town, and pottering in the garden. At seven o’clock that evening, as he was awaiting their return, a column of trucks roared into Nikolaevskaya Street, and braked at his front door. Armed troops, some 60 in number, jumped down and surrounded the house, bayonets drawn, as Andrei Kosmin, deputy chief of the Petrograd District, accompanied by the local Gatchina commandant, walked to the front door, to be met by a startled Michael. Kosmin, brandishing an order for his arrest on the orders of Kerensky, told him that he was now confined to his house, under guard.1
Half an hour later, a car drew up and Natasha and Johnson, alarmed by sight of the troops, hurried into the house. The waiting Kosmin stiffly nodded, told them that they too were under arrest, and then marched off, leaving the guard to the local and somewhat embarrassed commandant. He could only shrug at Michael’s questions; there was nothing he could do about it — the written order was signed by Boris Savinkov, a former revolutionary terrorist who was now ‘Director of the War Ministry’. The order read:
A bewildered Michael, now styled a ‘former’ Grand Duke, though there had been no decree to that effect and nor could there lawfully be since it was not within the power of the Provisional Government to pre-empt any decision reserved to the future Constituent Assembly, could not understand what any of this was about. There had been no warning, no hint of trouble, so why was Kerensky suddenly turning on him?
In fact, the order was a panic measure by a government now fearful of a ‘counter-revolution’ in favour of the monarchists. That being so, Michael was a threat, a rallying point for those who wanted to be rid of Kerensky and his discredited, oppressive and incompetent government. Yes, Kerensky had scored a victory over the Bolsheviks in July, with its leader Lenin in flight to Finland, but that was in-fighting between one brand of socialists and another, and for monarchists there was not much to choose between either.
A week earlier General Lavr Kornilov, the recently-appointed Supreme Commander, had been given a hero’s reception by the rightist delegates at the State Conference held in Moscow, and in consequence Kerensky had become convinced that ‘the next attempt at a blow would come from the right, and not from the left’.3
His suspicions were fuelled by reports that Mogilev was a hotbed of monarchist conspirators, a view encouraged by complaints that ‘in the evenings, in order to tease the local democrats,’4 the officers opened the windows and played on the piano the old national anthem,
Michael was arrested in this climate of an imagined monarchist counter-revolution, though the immediate cause three days earlier had been a farcical ‘plot’ to rescue Nicholas and his family from Tobolsk. The central figure was Margarita Khitrovo, a former maid-of-honour at the imperial court. The blindly-devoted Margarita journeyed to Tobolsk taking to Nicholas and Alexandra a large number of letters concealed in a pillow-case; within hours of her arrival on August 18, her hotel room was searched and the letters discovered. Arrested, she was sent back to Petrograd the following day.5
Although the letters turned out to be merely innocent correspondence, in the frantic atmosphere of Petrograd the news of her detention at Tobolsk was taken as evidence of a major counter-revolutionary plot.’ Highly exaggerated tales of this conspiracy reached the government’, admitted Kerensky later, but that was not enough to change his attitude towards Michael.6
Angry rather than alarmed, since he knew nothing of any so-called plot, Michael wrote a letter of protest to Kerensky demanding an end to his arrest and the withdrawal of the guards, but was told in reply only that ‘the present position of democracy and the state is such that it was found necessary to keep me in isolation’. They had been caught up, as he put it four days later, ‘in a plot which never existed’.7
As it happened, they were now to be embroiled in another plot which never existed, the so-called ‘Kornilov Affair’, an event which this time was to prove more tragedy than farce.
At 3 a.m. on Tuesday, August 29, eight days after the order placing them under house arrest, Michael and Natasha were awaked by an excited Gatchina commandant and told that they had to be ready to leave for Petrograd in an hour’s time with their family. The house was to be evacuated. Wakening the children and staff, and quickly packing suitcases for the unknown ahead, they trooped downstairs only to find that the military drivers could not get Michael’s cars started.
Michael watched them struggling for a while, and then suggested that it would be best if they called out his chauffeur to help. Eventually they did so, and he started the cars for them, his face saying what he thought of these bungling drivers. In consequence it was not until 5.10 a.m., 70 minutes later than ordered, that the convoy set out for Petrograd.8
From the viewpoint of their nervous guards it was just in time. The Supreme Commander General Lavr Kornilov had ordered his crack Third Cavalry Corps to advance on the capital and Michael’s ‘private army’, his beloved Savage Division, was marching on Gatchina, and was so close it would be in the woods around it within hours.
GENERAL Kornilov had intended to strengthen the government, not rebel against it. He had replaced Brusilov in mid-July after the failure of the ‘Kerensky Offensive’ launched on June 18, and he was determined to restore discipline in the army, including the reimposition of the death penalty. No army could wage war when regiments refused to advance or simply deserted to the rear whenever the enemy counter-attacked. The ‘Kerensky Offensive’ had shown that ‘the world’s first democratic army’ would, when tested, vote with its feet.
Kornilov, the son of a Cossack peasant, and the man who had formally placed Alexandra under house arrest at Tsarskoe Selo in March, did not think of himself as a rebel—‘I despise the old regime’, he said9— but he wanted a strong government which could free itself of its dependency on the dictating policies of the Soviet and the Bolsheviks.
On August 7, he ordered General Aleksandr Krymov on the Romanian Front to move his Third Cavalry Corps northwards so that it could deal with any attempted coup by the Bolsheviks in either Petrograd or Moscow. He was prepared, he told his chief-of-staff, to disperse the Soviet, hang its leaders, and finish off the Bolsheviks.10
As they headed north there came intelligence reports that the Bolsheviks, Lenin having quietly returned, had regrouped and were planning another attempt at seizing power in the capital. On August 22 Kerensky asked Kornilov to send a cavalry corps to defend the government, but intending that this corps, when in the capital, would then come under his direct control, not Kornilov’s. It would then give him a force not only able to deal with the Bolsheviks, but with any attempt by the right to mount a counter-revolutionary attack against him. He would cover a threat from either or both.
This ploy backfired. The Third Cavalry Corps, which included the Savage Division and two Cossack divisions, as well as artillery, was what he would be getting and not the ‘democratic’ and biddable divisions he had expected. The Third Cavalry Corps, commanded by General Krymov, the ‘political’ general who had been one of the key figures in the Guchkov conspiracy which had been intent six months earlier on capturing Nicholas in his train, was staffed by monarchist officers, and its men were immune from Soviet and Bolshevik indoctrination. Kornilov, it seemed, was sending a Trojan Horse.
Certainly, Boris Savinkov, Kerensky’s emissary at Mogilev, saw it that way. He urged that Krymov be replaced and he also sought to have the Savage Division, known to be loyal to Michael, and commanded by his old friend Prince Bagration, removed from the corps.11 Kornilov ignored him. There was no point, he
