‘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 Stavka shortly after his arrival, and after they had signed a letter to the Tsar demanding the removal of the aged prime minister Ivan Goremykin, appointed in 1914. At seventy-six he was exhausted and broken: ‘the candles have already been lit round my coffin’, he said, ‘and the only thing required to complete the ceremony is myself.’43
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 (sic), be the master & lord, you are the Autocrat & they dare not forget it, when they do, as now, woe unto them.’47 Competence was no longer the determining factor in government. ‘The ministers are rotten, be decided, repremand (sic) them very severely for their behaviour.’48
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 the ministers’.49 Divinely groomed, Nicholas dealt briskly with them and proudly cabled Alexandra to say afterwards that ‘the conference passed off well. I told them my opinion sternly to their faces…50 Michael, in witnessing this political drama, was given little encouragement that his brother would make the kind of changes which he believed were now essential. Believing in constitutional government as he did, and which he had seen to be the norm in Britain, he could not understand why his brother was so opposed to it — until he realised that it was not Nicholas but his wife who ruled the roost.
But nothing that Michael said made any difference. Nicholas listened to him, thanked him, but then went back to his desk and to his orders piling up on his desk from his wife.
The day after the ministers left, Michael left also, knowing that there was nothing more he could say that would be of any use. Afterwards, Alexandra, blind to anything but her own conviction, wrote to Nicholas to say that ‘you must miss Misha now — how nice that you had him staying with you — I am sure that it must have done him good in every sense.’51
She was to be disappointed. Seeing things through his brother’s eyes had done Michael no good whatsoever.
6. RIVAL COURTS
MICHAEL, kept out of the frontline as he recovered from diphtheria, had settled very happily back into the domestic routine of Gatchina. Although his assets were still frozen, he had managed to extract enough money from his reluctant administrators to have the house at 24 Nikolaevskaya Street, renovated and improved. It was no longer the tumbledown it had been, with a rickety fence which the local police had complained about as a danger to passers-by. The courtyard had been covered with gravel, the summerhouse painted white, the garden filled with flowers, and a new tennis court built at the rear. Michael loved it and wanted nothing more.
He had, by imperial standards, only a handful of servants, some of whom lived in the house, and others with quarters in the one next door. They included his valet and chauffeur, Natasha’s long-serving personal maid Ayuna, a cook, the maids who cleaned and helped in the kitchen, and a washerwoman living above the washhouse in the back courtyard. There was also a new English governess, the redoubtable Margaret Neame — her predecessor, hired at Knebworth, having gone home. There were also two ADCs and an adjutant on his military staff, though they lived elsewhere in the town, as did his secretary Nikolai Johnson, who had taken an apartment on Baggout Street, near the Warsaw railway station, and close to the apartment where Natasha had lived with Wulfert.
But his household had no butler to wait at table, or liveried servants in attendance at formal dinner parties, and in that respect he did not live as grandly as at Knebworth, or could have done at Gatchina palace, where an army of retainers continued to preserve state rooms which in the main only they walked through. Michael made full use of the park, and he took advantage of the gymnasium sited in one of the quadrangles adjoining the main palace, but otherwise he was not seen there at all.
He took no precautions for his personal safety. There were no guards and apart from the low wooden picket fence, the house lay open to the front. When Michael returned home he simply parked his car on the short drive to the side of his house, walked through his front door and stepped into the living room — like every other owner of the villas and his neighbours in that suburban road.
In town, he was a familiar figure in the street and shops; he took his family to the palace church on Sundays. He spoke to the townspeople as freely as they would speak to each other, and regularly attended social gatherings and other like activities of a small community. Evening after evening was spent in committee work on various charities, and when he was convalescing stepdaughter Tata would ‘often remember him coming in dead tired’ after an exhausting round of lengthy meetings.1 He was a keen handyman, and when he got up in the morning he would often go first into the garden, to his workshop, and there ‘with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, he would plane, chisel and saw. He loved working on a lathe’.2 In the evenings his favourite pastime was music, and often he noted in his diary that he had ‘played the guitar’, sometimes with his aide and fellow enthusiast Prince Vyazemsky, or with Johnson as accompanist on the piano.