The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II

such was the excuse, the four Grand Dukes were taken from their cells, shipped downriver to the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, and on January 19 lined up against a wall and shot, their bodies thrown into a mass grave.

That brought the number of Romanovs known to have been murdered by the Bolsheviks to seventeen in the past six months. Michael would make it eighteen, but who was going to announce that without a body, and without a confession?

Nine months later, in September 1919, after a desperate letter from Natasha in London, Admiral Kolchak, signing himself as Supreme Commander of the White Army, replied that all information I possess does not give any indication that the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich is at present in Siberia or the Far East His destiny is quite unknown after he was taken away… and all attempts to find out where he is have not produced any results.¹

In short, Michael was to be ‘presumed dead’ but the Admiral chose not to say that directly. He was trying to be kind.

NATASHA’S journey back to Britain with Tata had taken many weeks. The Nereide took her down the Black Sea only as far as Constantinople where later she was given passage in a British battleship, Agamemnon, to Malta; from there she went by merchant ship to Marseilles; by rail to Paris, and finally on to London.

It was not therefore until March 1919 that she reached Wadhurst, in Sussex, and the large comfortable Tudor house, ‘Snape’, which with Paddockhurst no longer available had been leased in Michael’s name in 1917 in expectation of his return at war’s end. Michael had then transferred enough cash to secure it for two years, so at least Natasha had somewhere to go. Johnson’s mother had gone there from Paddockhurst; like Natasha, she was desperate for news. Her son was also missing. Where Michael was, he must be. The arrival of Natasha raised her hopes that somehow all might yet be well.

Natasha still believed she would see Michael again. In Paris there had been the exciting news that the French Colonial Office had received a ‘top secret’ report that Michael was in French Indo-China, and asking for a visa. The French wanted photographs for identification. Bitterly, the man turned out to be a fraud². There were other false alarms. Michael was in Japan. Michael was in Siam. Each time, desperate hope was followed by despair.³

It was torture — and in all this, one comfort was that little George had been brought back by Miss Neame from Copenhagen, and that after a year of separation she at last had her two children safely back in her arms. ‘Where is Papa?’ George had asked plaintively in a letter he had written in August 1918 on his eighth birthday;⁴ it was still his question now, and there was still no answer.

The only moment of joy for Natasha was when Grand Duke Dimitri walked back into her life. Wearing British uniform he had been brought to Britain from Persia by the British ambassador there, Sir Charles Marling, in defiance of the rule that no male Romanov was to be allowed into the country. The ambassador would be rapped over the knuckles for that, but that was as far as it went. Dimitri would be the sole exception; the other surviving Grand Dukes would make France their home, for the door remained shut in Britain.

Dimitri would be a constant visitor for the first weeks and they teased each other as before. Thirty months had passed since their last meeting at Gatchina in October 1916, expecting that they would then meet again at Brasovo for Christmas, not as now in England — Dimitri penniless, his father Paul executed that January by a firing squad, Natasha not knowing whether she was wife or widow. But although he was as flattering as ever, Natasha was so tormented by her fears for Michael that she could hardly talk about anything else. By the summer he had drifted away, trying to pick up the pieces of his own life.⁵ As a sign of just how much the world had changed, on July 26, 1919, Natasha travelled up to London to Marlborough House to meet the Dowager Empress Marie. The British had sent a battleship to Odessa to rescue the Dowager Empress, her daughter Xenia and a swollen entourage of fellow refugees who had sheltered with her in the Crimea under German protection. Arriving in London she had gone to stay with her sister, the Dowager Queen Alexandra. The meeting was the first since she had given Natasha a dressing-down there six years earlier in 1913.

Nervous at the prospect, Natasha took Mme Johnson along with her as moral support, as well as little George, the grandson the Dowager Empress had never seen in Russia, nor had wanted to know about. Now the Dowager Empress made a great fuss of George; her beloved Michael’s only son, and with looks that reminded her of his father at that age.⁶

As for Michael, she brushed aside Natasha’s fears for him, adamant that he was alive and well; indeed she went much further than that: she refused to believe that anyone in her immediate family had been killed by the Bolsheviks. She would persist in so saying until her own death nine years later in Copenhagen. Natasha came away heartened, but vaguely disturbed. Everyone knew that Nicholas had been killed, except it seemed his mother. What value, then, her confidence that Michael was alive?

As the months went on, other worries crowded in. There had been some cash left in the Paris bank account set up when they left Russia in 1912, and ?3,000 was transferred from Michael’s Danish account to her London bank,⁷ but her main asset was the jewellery she had smuggled out of Russia. Piece by piece she sold them to meet her bills, school fees for George and Tata, and her rental costs as she moved from Snape in 1920, firstly to a country house near Richmond, Surrey, and then to a smart apartment in West London. Natasha was beginning to worry about making ends meet.

There was nothing surprising in that. Europe was awash with poverty-stricken royals — Germans, Austrians, Greeks as well as Russians and others. The collapse of old Europe brought devastation in its wake as crowns were kicked into the gutter with no one to pick them up again. The Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin shot himself; so did the Kaiser’s desolate youngest son Joachim. A British gunboat sent up the Danube rescued the ex-Austrian emperor Karl from mob revenge in Hungary, though he died shortly after being sent with his wife and eight children into exile in Portuguese Madeira, arriving with just ?320 in his pocket. A British cruiser snatched Prince Andrew of Greece from a firing squad in Athens, after he was court-martialled as scapegoat for the humiliating defeat suffered by Greece in its war with Turkey; unwelcome in Britain, in 1944 he would die penniless in Monaco — and thus never to know that four years later his only son Philip would marry the future Queen of England.

In London, Dimitri’s sister Marie was reduced to knitting sweaters for a living. When in desperation she wrote to Queen Mary for help, she received in reply a letter which did not contain the hoped-for cheque, but merely a list of people the Queen suggested might buy her sweaters.

Dimitri gave up on London as too expensive and went to Paris where he ended up in the arms of Coco Chanel, the famed perfumier. She kept him in style in the Ritz, though by chance he amply repaid her: testing out six new perfumes, she asked him to tell her which he liked most; he sniffed all six then pronounced the fifth to be the best. Chanel No 5 would prove to be one of the most successful brands of all time. Fortunately for Dimitri, he went on in 1924 to marry an American heiress, Audrey Emery of Cincinnati; their son — born in London and thereafter known as Paul Ilyinski, would become a US marine, and end up as Republican mayor of Palm Beach, Florida.

Otherwise, the reality for those who had lost everything was that empty titles were matched by empty pockets. It also concentrated minds. Natasha’s financial problems would go on, but inevitably there came a time when she had to face the fact that Michael was dead. Coming to terms with that was also a practical necessity: Michael’s assets had to be recovered and his affairs sorted out while they still could be. To achieve that he had to be declared dead by a court, and six years after he had disappeared without trace, that was what happened. On July 5, 1924, the High Court in London granted her letters of administration of the English estates of the late Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich of Russia who ‘died on or since the 12 day of June 1918, at a place unknown, intestate’.⁸ The value of Michael’s assets in England were given as only ?95, but it was the order not the money which mattered.

Michael was legally dead. And nowhere was the news received more gladly than in a little fishing village across the Channel. For here at last was the opportunity Grand Duke Kirill had so long been waiting for, to take what he had not dared to take before. He would now become the next Emperor.

IN June 1917 Kirill had been given permission by Kerensky to go to Finland; he remained there with his family until 1920, when they all left for Germany. Later he and his German-born wife Ducky and their three children made their home in St Briac, on the Brittany coast. It was here on August 8, one month after the London High