OFF the streets that week because of strikes, the Petrograd newspapers returned with their first reports of the dramatic events of the past few days. With only one notable exception — Milyukov’s Kadet party newspaper Rech — they presented Michael’s abdication in the way the government intended. Nicholas’s manifesto was followed immediately by Michael’s, their intentional juxtaposition helping the headlines which linked both as equal abdications.
In four newspapers — Birzhevye Vedomosti, Den, Petrogradsky Listok, and Petrogradskaya Gazeta — the headlines were identicaclass="underline" ‘Abdication of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich’.7 There was nothing in the text itself to justify that, but the accompanying statement by the Provisional Government included the word ‘abdication’ and that in turn justified the headlines over the manifesto. Eyes glazed over the lawyer-speak below, their minds already made up by the headlines.
From ‘abdication’ grew the assumption, fed by triumphant Soviet propaganda, that the monarchy was finished. Even the British and French ambassadors seemed to think in consequence that Russia was now a republic. Both were to be corrected by Milyukov, the new foreign minister. ‘The Constituent Assembly alone will be qualified to change the political status of Russia’, he told Paléologue;8 and when he heard Buchanan referring to the new government as republican, ‘he caught me up, saying that it was only a Provisional Government pending the decision of the future Constituent Assembly’.9
Correcting the impression gathered by two experienced and senior ambassadors was one thing; it was quite another with the country at large. Michael had been wasting his time at the school desk it seemed. What he had signed was not his suspension of imperial power until the decision of a future constituent assembly, but his abdication. What was intended as temporary was taken as permanent. Everyone knew that, because it said so in the newspapers. Some people, reading the manifesto, would say that he had ‘refused the crown’ rather than abdicated, but the effect was the same. Michael had given up.
There were exceptions to this generally negative response. In The Times of London, for example, the judgement of Robert Wilton, their respected correspondent in Petrograd, was that ‘perhaps in the end it will be all for the best’. Accepting that while ‘at present we must be content to go on with the Provisional Government until quieter days supervene,’ he concluded that were it possible to bring about the Constituent Assembly ‘there could be little doubt as to the election of Grand Duke Michael to the Throne by an overwhelming majority’.10 Following events in Yalta, Princess Cantacuzène took much the same view — ‘we looked forward to the probability of the Constituent Assembly being in favour of a constitutional monarchy’.11
Besides, as Michael might wryly have reflected, the idea of having his succession confirmed by being ‘elected’ was exactly how the Romanov dynasty came into being. The first Romanov, his namesake Michael I, had been elected by a national assembly in 1613. After 300 years, a second ‘election’ of a second Michael would change the Romanovs from autocrats into constitutional monarchs, like the British. No one on March 3, 1917 could know that a future assembly would vote to retain the monarchy, but equally no one could know that it would not. Six months is a long time, and if Russia won great victories in the summer, and the public mood improved, the picture could well look very different. Re-reading Michael’s manifesto then, what it actually said might be better understood. However, that appeared a vain hope in the immediate aftermath of its publication.
Some people would never forgive Michael for becoming Emperor but not being Emperor. Grand Duke George wrote to his wife that while ‘Misha’s manifesto seems to have calmed the republicans, the others are angry with him…’12 The right-wing Duma member Vasily Maklakov, who was not at Millionnaya Street, called the manifesto ‘strange and criminal… an act of lunacy or treason, had not the authors been qualified and patriotic lawyers.’13 In Tsarskoe Selo, Grand Duke Paul’s wife Princess Paley, damned Michael as ‘a feeble creature’ and ‘a weakling’,14 though there was no surprise in her saying that.
In short, in some quarters it would be Michael who would be blamed for the fall of the House of Romanov. ‘Not us’ they would cry, ‘it was him’.
One exception in Michael’s corner was A. A. Mossolov, former head of the Court Chancellery, who observed that when Michael ‘became Emperor, those Grand Dukes who were in Petrograd failed to rally around him’15. Bimbo apart, that was true, although the excuse would be that either they could not get near him that day, or they did not know where he was.
But in casting blame, the ultimate responsibility for all that happened lay with Nicholas, and above all, Alexandra.
Brooding over events in faraway Persia, Dimitri was in no doubt about that. ‘The final catastrophe,’ he judged, ‘has been brought about by the wilful and short-sighted obstinacy of a woman. It has, naturally, swept away Tsarskoe Selo, and all of us, at one stroke.’16
MICHAEL’S manifesto, in empowering the Provisional Government as lawful, also bound it to do what it promised to do, and which limited its role to that of restoring order, continuing the war, and exercising its powers only until such time as the Constituent Assembly determined the status of Russia. In particular it had no rights to pre-empt any decision reserved to the elected Assembly when it came into being.
So it seemed on March 3. The reality was very different. Michael did not surrender the Romanovs, the new government would do that for him, yielding to the clamouring pressures of the Soviet. There would be no place in the new order for Grand Dukes: their rank, privilege, wealth, land and even liberty were now at the disposal of a government in hock to the Soviet. The meeting at Millionnaya Street had not intended it, but long before any constituent assembly could come into being, the Romanovs would be out of business. Indeed, that seemed to be the case almost immediately, such was the weakness of the new government.
On his return to Gatchina Michael had assumed that he would continue with some role in the army, or at least do so when conditions allowed it. Technically he was still Inspector-General of Cavalry with the rank of colonel-general, but he was willing to serve in any capacity. He was to be immediately disappointed; there would be no job for him or any other Grand Duke.
‘They do not allow us to go the front fearing that we might start a counter-revolution,’ wrote Grand Duke George from Gatchina, though no such idea has ‘even crossed our minds.’17 Perhaps so, but in Petrograd the government knew that the Soviet would never believe that.
On April 5, one month after he signed his manifesto, Michael noted with scarcely concealed bitterness: ‘Today I received my discharge from military service,’ adding caustically ‘with uniform’.18 It was another pointer to the way reality had overtaken the meeting at Millionnaya Street.
Next day, Michael and Natasha, together with cousin George, went by train to Petrograd, Michael’s first visit to the capital since his manifesto. There was no imperial carriage now; they would have to travel like everyone else, buying tickets, and finding seats where they could. They were intent on organising the removal of his furniture from his mother’s home at the Anichkov Palace before it was ‘liberated’ by the workers.19 It would be the first and only time that Natasha would ever set foot in the palace in which Michael had been born 38 years earlier.