Shulgin strode back into the station, the crowd making way for him as he went forward looking for Guchkov. Suddenly he was aware of an urgent voice telling him that he was wanted on the telephone in the station-master’s office. When he walked in and picked up the receiver it was to hear the croaking voice of Milyukov. ‘Don’t make known the manifesto’, barked Milyukov. ‘There have been serious changes.’
A startled Shulgin could only stammer a reply. ‘But how?…I have already announced it.’
‘To whom?’
‘Why, to all here. Some regiment or other. The people. I have proclaimed Michael Emperor.’
‘You should not have done that’, shouted Milyukov. ‘Feelings have become much worse since you left…Don’t take any further steps. There may be great misfortune.’7
Bewildered, Shulgin put down the phone, and looked around for Guchkov. He had gone off to a meeting of 2,000 men in some nearby railway workshops, he was told, intent on spreading the glad tidings of Michael’s succession. Shulgin was about to go after him when he remembered that he still had the manifesto in his pocket. The railway shopmen had been staunch supports of the Soviet; if he went in, would he get out?
At that moment the telephone rang. This time it was Bublikov, the man whom the Duma Committee had appointed as Railway Commissioner. He was sending his own man to the station. ‘You can trust him with anything…Understand?’ Shulgin understood perfectly. A few minutes later Bublikov’s messenger thrust himself through the crowd and Shulgin slipped him the envelope bearing the manifesto. The man took it and disappeared back to the transport ministry offices, where it was hidden under a pile of old magazines.
Shulgin then headed for the workshops, where Guchkov was standing on a platform above a dense mass of railwaymen, being harangued by its chairman, sneering protests about a new government led by a prince and full of landowners and wealthy industrialists.
‘Is this what we had the revolution for, comrades? Prince Lvov?’ It was clearly not the time nor place to cry out ‘Long Live Emperor Michael’.
As Shulgin joined Guchkov on the platform, the seething workers began to move forward menacingly. Here were two representatives of this bourgeois government, sent secretly to confer with the Tsar at Pskov. Whom did they really represent? ‘Shut the doors, comrades,’ cried the leaders.
The situation looked nasty, but then the railmen began to quarrel amongst themselves, with some shouting that the shopmen on the platform were behaving ‘like the old regime’. Pushing, shoving, the crowd began to turn on its own, with voices calling out for Guchkov to be allowed to speak. He did so, briefly, defending the aims of the new government but prudently deciding not to mention Michael. As tempers cooled, the doors were opened again, and a shaken Guchkov and Shulgin were allowed to leave.8
By then the news of the proclamations read out at the Warsaw station had raced across the city. Lawyer Vladimir Nabokov, unaware that he was soon to play a critical role in the future of the monarchy, heard about Michael’s succession twice over as he was walking to work from his apartment on the Morskaya, and when he reached his office he found ‘great excitement, with crowds on the stairs and in the big conference hall’.9
Curiously, one of the last to discover the name of the new Emperor of All the Russias was Michael himself. When Kerensky telephoned the apartment at 5.55 a.m. he made no mention of the manifesto. The new government was not yet ready to tell him about that.
MILLIONNAYA Street was half-awake when Kerensky made his call. The apartment was spacious; even so, it was exceptionally crowded this Friday morning. Officers of the guard were sleeping in the study and Michael, his brother-in-law Matveev and Johnson were sleeping on settees and makeshift beds. Matveev had brought in fresh shirts and underwear since Michael had arrived in Millionnaya Street with only the clothes they were standing up in.
Johnson took the call from Kerensky and learned only that the ‘Council of Ministers’ would be arriving for a meeting in about an hour. Michael was not surprised for they were expecting formal news of Nicholas’s abdication; but as Matveev would firmly record, ‘in the light of the letter from the President of the State Duma Rodzyanko’ delivered the evening before, they assumed that the delegation was coming ‘to report on the Regency’. While they waited, Michael was ‘therefore thinking over his appropriate reply expressing his consent’.10
The telephone call that ought to have been made to Millionnaya Street that morning would not have been at 5.55 but some two hours earlier, or just after 3 a.m. At Tsarskoe Selo that was the time that the garrison commander first tried to call Grand Duke Paul to tell him about the manifesto just received from Pskov; he thought it best if it was Paul who broke the news to Alexandra. Because he could not get through, an officer was sent to his palace. Paul came down in his dressing gown, and an artillery colonel, with a large red bow on his chest, read them the text of Nicholas’s abdication. ‘We realised at once that all was finished’, said Paul’s wife Princess Paley.11
Paul, in the event, could not bring himself to go to the Alexander Palace until 11 a.m. There he found Alexandra in her hospital uniform, still unaware that she was no longer Empress. After Paul told her what had happened, tears rolled down her cheeks, and she bent her head as if praying. ‘If Nicky has done that, it is because he had to do so…God will not abandon us… As it is Misha who is Emperor, I shall look after my children and my hospital. We shall go to the Crimea.’12
That Alexandra would not know of the abdication until mid-morning was understandable; that the new Emperor was not formally told as soon as the news reached Petrograd was astonishing. The silence was deliberate.
One reason why the new government was anxious that Michael should not know about the manifesto making him Emperor was that they did not want him better prepared than they were when eventually they did meet him. Kerensky would later gloss over the details of his telephone call to Millionnaya Street, but he would say of Michael that ‘we did not know how much he knew’ while adding that it was important ‘to prevent whatever steps he was planning to take until we had come to a decision’.13
Whatever steps? There was only one action that Michael would have taken had he found out independently that he had been named Emperor, and that would have been to telephone Prince Lvov at the Tauride Palace and summon him to Millionnaya Street, with doubtless a few others, but not the entire Committee. The problem then is that he would have been asking the awkward questions, and Prince Lvov would not have had the answers.
If Milyukov, leader of the largest bloc in the Duma had insisted on accompanying Lvov to such a meeting — after all, Lvov was a man he had championed — that could have been awkward for those at the Tauride Palace who, led by Kerensky but also ‘blue funk’ Rodzyanko, were now more concerned about saving the new Provisional Government and themselves than saving the monarchy.
At 6 a.m. Kerensky, after his brief telephone call to Millionnaya Street, knew that Michael had not been told independently about the manifesto. Saying that the delegation would be with him in about an hour was more hope than reality. The hope was that the delegation, the majority of them already defeatist on the issue of the manifesto, could be with Michael before he had a chance to find out he was Emperor. The streets would be dark, the city scarcely awake, and with luck they could browbeat a stunned Michael into surrender before the Soviet had time to start browbeating them.