with Alexandra behind him the Dowager Empress could only wring her hands and cry, ‘What are we coming to, what are we coming to?’28 Duke Alexander of Oldenburg, known in the family as ‘Uncle Alex’, was in equal despair when he saw the Dowager Empress. As she would tell Andrew afterwards, ‘he rolled on the floor’.29
The young Grand Duke Dimitri — who had won the Cross of St George in 1914 after dismounting from his horse under heavy fire to carry a wounded corporal to safety — was as shocked as anyone by the news. When the French ambassador told him that he doubted that the Tsar would change his mind, Dimitri angrily threw away his cigarette and cried: ‘Then we’re lost. Henceforth it will be the Empress and her
Alexandra was quite frank, and startlingly so, in showing her dominance over her husband. When the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, met her at Tsarskoe Selo and told her of his worries about Nicholas assuming the Supreme Command, she told him: ‘The situation requires firmness. The Emperor, unfortunately, is weak; but I am not and I intend to be firm.’31 However true, to say that to the ambassador of an allied country, duty bound to report it to his government, was wholly unforgivable.
None the less, on August 25, 1915, the Tsar ended his first day as Supreme Commander on a confident note. ‘We had only just finished playing dominoes,’ he wrote to Alexandra, when news came that the southern army had captured ‘over 150 officers, over 7,000 men, thirty guns and many machine-guns. And this happened immediately after our troops learnt that I have taken upon myself the Supreme Command. This is truly God’s blessing…’32 To underline this sign from Heaven, he sent the same news by telegram next day, so that she could be doubly assured about ‘our glorious success’ and that ‘this happened immediately after the declaration of my appointment’.33
MICHAEL was soon to find out for himself what life was like at
The place chosen was the provincial capital of Mogilev, 180 miles (290km) further east and it was there, eight weeks earlier on his way back from the front, that Michael had breakfasted with Nikolasha in the tent set up beside the commander-in-chief’s train, never thinking that the next time he was at
The first and most obvious change he would find was that the new Supreme Commander no longer lived in a train. ‘In view of the dampness of the wood, where the train was standing’, Nicholas took comfortable quarters in the Governor’s mansion.34
The suggestion that Michael should be called to Mogilev came from Alexandra. While he had been at the front he had been ignored, but recovering from illness and back at Gatchina with ‘that wife’ of his to tell him what was being said in the capital, there was now no knowing what might happen. Alexandra wished to avoid a rival court and to make sure of that she wanted Michael with his brother, not with Natasha.
Thus, as Nicholas arrived in Mogilev, Alexandra wrote to him: ‘Won’t you send for Misha to stay a bit with you…would be so nice and homely for you, & good to get him away from her & yr. brother is the one to be with you.’35 Six days later she was anxiously enquiring: Have you news from Misha? I have no idea where he is. Do get him to stop a bit with you — get him quite to yourself.’36
Four days later, on Thursday, September 10, 1915, a still groggy Michael set off on the 500-mile (800km) journey southward to Mogilev. He got there next day and Nicholas immediately cabled Alexandra to say so, adding surprisingly that ‘he looks well’.37 Two days later Nicholas wrote home again: ‘The weather continues to be lovely. I go out every day in a car with Misha and we spend a great deal of my leisure together, as in former years. He is so calm and charming…’38
It was encouraging news for Alexandra, who replied by continuing to impress on Nicholas the importance of having his brother at his side — ‘your very own brother, it’s just his place and the longer he stops with you, away from her bad influence the better it is and you will get him to see things with your own eyes’.39 She meant her eyes. Her only warning was that ‘I fear Misha will ask for his wife to get a title — she can’t — she left two husbands already & he is your only brother’.40
In response, Nicholas’s letters did not encourage Alexandra in her hopes of a repentant Michael eager to admit the errors of his ways and ready to dump ‘that wife’. Nor was there anything to show him a stalwart champion of Nicholas against the dark forces of the Duma. Despite their long hours together, all that Alexandra would learn was that ‘Misha often sits with me.’41 Yet, alone together, there was plenty to say that week, and Michael did his best to say it even though, as he would later reveal, it was sadly to no avail.
Nevertheless, that week at Mogilev gave Michael, as nothing else would do, a clear insight into how his brother was conducting affairs in the midst of the greatest military, parliamentary and governmental crisis since 1905. With the enemy fast advancing, the Duma had been in such uproar that Nicholas had ordered it to be adjourned. Ministers were openly quarrelling among themselves. And every day Michael saw Nicholas sit down, cigarette in hand, and read what Alexandra believed he should be doing.
A letter might be fifteen pages long, Alexandra’s pen leaping from one thought to another, and from one demand to another. She always wrote in English, and at such speed that she often seemed to be rambling incoherently, with words frequently misspelt. In that week she wrote six letters to Nicholas, each containing an average of 2,000 words. Pausing only to stub out one cigarette and light another, Nicholas read through her letters impassively as she urged him to do this and do that.
‘I long to put my nose into everything — to wake up people, put order into all & unite all’, she had written just before Michael’s arrival.42 Order and unity, in fact, meant a Russia in which everyone did exactly what she told them to do.
In the event, Michael’s visit was dominated not by the terrible defeats of war but by home-front politics — a crisis meeting of ministers called to
The Duma, which had not met in the first six months of 1914, was largely composed of conservative and liberal members — landowners, industrialists, lawyers, academics, and well-off businessmen. What they wanted was a greater voice in government, a share in policy-making, and ministers who were more accountable to them. The current Duma was the fourth since the now side-lined Sergei Witte had become the first prime minister in 1906. The first two had swiftly come and gone; the third had run its full course of five years and the fourth, elected in 1912, still had two years to run.
The session which had opened on July 19, 1915, had seen the emergence of a new ‘Progressive Bloc’, a liberal-conservative alliance which represented 250 of the 402 Duma deputies. Because of the military disasters at the front, this majority group demanded the creation of a ‘government of public confidence’. Alexandra had vehemently opposed the Duma being called at all — ‘it’s not their business…they speak too much…Russia, thank God, is not a constitutional country’44 — and by the end of August 1915 she was urging Nicholas ‘only quickly shut the Duma’.45 He did, four days later.
The closure was immediately followed by strikes at the giant Putilov munitions factory in Petrograd and did nothing to solve a growing crisis in the government itself. Most ministers favoured working more closely with the Duma and believed that what was needed was co-operation not confrontation, but their efforts were frustrated by the doddering Goremykin, whose sole policy seemed to be that of ‘for me, an imperial command is law’.46 He seemed not to have grasped that imperial commands now came from Alexandra.
In turn, Alexandra was in no doubt about the right response to the ministerial rebellion. ‘Clean out all, give Goremykin new ministers & God will bless you…Show your fist, chastisen (
She offered Nicholas mystical support in his forthcoming confrontation with a comb blessed by Rasputin. Having told him it ‘would bring its little help’, she urged him ‘to comb your hair with His comb before the sitting of
