15. PLAYING FOR TIME
ONLY a couple of hours earlier, Michael had expected a meeting in which he would have been sitting in his chair as Regent, not as Emperor, for taking the crown was a possibility he had never considered, though neither had anyone else other than his brother after he decided that ‘a father’s feelings’ came before everything else in deciding the fate of Russia. Michael was still struggling to come to terms with that, for removing Alexis from the succession was so contrary to every ambition hitherto held for him that it hardly seemed credible. Alexandra had been obsessed with ‘Baby’s rights’, had fought like a tigress to protect them, and had brought Russia to the brink of ruin in consequence. Now, in a moment, Alexis had been swept aside.
But could Nicholas do that? It was not a question which bothered the troops and people cheering Michael’s name across the country that morning, and in the midst of a great war and civil unrest, what mattered to them more was that the hated Nicholas had gone, along with the reviled government of Alexandra’s lackeys.
There were many in the army who welcomed Michael on his own merits, and among the people at large those who knew of Michael approved, and among those who knew only his name, there was nothing they had heard to his discredit. Married not to a foreign princess but to a commoner from Moscow? If anything, that was reassurance, at least for those who were not committed republicans, that Russia would now have a new kind of monarchy and a constitutional Tsar who understood the concerns of the ordinary man-in-the-street.
If those relief forces which Nicholas had so confidently ordered to the capital had actually arrived, and the revolutionaries in the Tauride Palace had been driven out, then the frightened men of the Duma might have emerged as heroes, rather than cowards. But the troops had been turned back when Nicholas had been stopped, literally, in his tracks, and the battalion of heroes sent to Tsarskoe Selo had also turned back, for much the same reason. He wasn’t there. He was on a train trundling back to Pskov, and he would not arrive back at Stavka until 8.20 that Friday evening.1 Once again, in the midst of a crisis, he had vanished, leaving chaos in his wake.
The problem was not therefore whether Michael ought to be Emperor, but that he was, and as such the Petrograd Soviet and the frightened mutineers who gave them the only military power available in the capital, were joined together in their determination to get rid of him — the first, because it would destroy the monarchy, and the second because it would save them from the gallows. In turn, that decided matters for the new government. Michael had to go, and the question of whether his succession was lawful or not was of no account. He was the Emperor, and there was nothing that could be done about that. It was reality.
What was also reality was that when Michael began the meeting he was to find that everyone addressed him not as ‘Your Imperial Majesty’ but as ‘Your Highness’ — thus, not as Emperor but as Grand Duke. That had been a collective decision before the meeting: that they would signal their determination for his departure by using the title he would use after his abdication, rather than his title before he signed such a manifesto. It was intended as intimidation, and they thought it would also speed up the clock.
Michael made no comment about the form of address, though he could not but note it and understand the reason behind it. The majority of men were not here to support him. Looking around the room he could see that they were exhausted, unshaven, bedraggled and, as Prince Lvov would put it, unable even to think straight any more.2 Kerensky would admit that he himself had been ‘near collapse’. At dawn the previous day he had walked back to his apartment at 29 Tverskaya, and had fallen into bed, lying there for two or three hours in a ‘semi-delirious state’ for that was the only rest he had managed in the past five days.3 Milyukov was so exhausted that he ‘was falling asleep where he sat…He would start, open his eyes, then begin to sleep again’.4
In some cases it was not exhaustion but terror that marked the faces of the men from the Duma. Dread of the Soviet would be the recurring theme of the morning’s discussions, and that fear would be heightened by Kerensky, the only man in the room who could claim to speak for the mob.
Kerensky, a master of the theatrical posture, would convince some there that he also was ‘terrified’ and that at any moment a gang of armed men might break in and murder the new Emperor, if not the rest of them.5
Fear was a weapon, and it was the principal weapon which Rodzyanko would use that morning. As he had done in his wires to Pskov and Mogilev he drew a black picture of the world outside the windows, where civil war loomed and a bloodbath threatened. Although as terrified as anyone else, he would forget that when writing from the safety of his memoirs; he would prefer history to believe that the only man fearing for his life that day at Millionnaya Street was Michael himself.
It was quite clear to us that the Grand Duke would have reigned only a few hours, and that this would have led to colossal bloodshed in the precincts of the capital, which would have degenerated into general civil war. It was clear to us that the Grand Duke would have been killed immediately, together with all adherents, for he had no reliable troops at his disposal then, and could not sustain himself by armed support. The Grand Duke asked me outright whether I could guarantee his life if he acceded to the throne, and I had to answer in the negative.6
This was self-serving nonsense. Rodzyanko was in no position to guarantee anyone’s life, including his own, and certainly there was never reason for Michael, with Russia’s two highest military honours pinned to his chest, to look to the quaking Rodzyanko for protection. He was better off with the cadets downstairs. However, Rodzyanko lived to write his memoirs and Michael did not.
Milyukov, with Guchkov not yet arrived, was the sole spokesman for those who believed that Rodzyanko and Lvov were leading the government to ultimate ruin, as would prove the case. Rousing himself, he argued that it would be immeasurably more difficult in the long term if the established order was simply abandoned, for in his reasoning the ‘frail craft’ of the self-elected Provisional Government, without a monarch, would soon be sunk ‘in the ocean of national disorder’.7
As he advanced his case the combative Milyukov found himself fighting against a babble of angry voices; all idea of a measured debate had been swept away in a torrent of noisy argument. To latecomer Shulgin, now arrived with Guchkov, ‘Milyukov seemed unwilling, or unable to stop talking…This man, usually so polite and self-controlled, did not let anybody else speak, and interrupted those who tried to answer him.’8
Milyukov would say afterwards that ‘I admitted that my opponents may have been right. Perhaps indeed those present and the Grand Duke himself were in danger. But we were playing for high stakes — for the whole of Russia — and we had to take a risk, however great it was.’9 In his view the better alternative early that morning would have been to confront the Soviet with the new manifesto and to have told them it would make no difference — that they would ensure that Michael endorsed the deal they had already struck and that the Soviet position and that of the mutineers was no different than before.
As it was, by concealing the manifesto in the hope of buying time, the Duma men looked as if they were hiding something when the Soviet found out anyway about Michael once the manifesto was proclaimed in the city; it made it look as if they were being double-crossed. This in itself was good reason for the Duma men’s anxiety to get back to the Tauride Palace with the abdication, as evidence of their own good faith.