As Michael settled down in his carriage at Gatchina, ‘a soldier came running to the compartment in which Misha sat by the window, and taking off his military fur cap, made a deep bow’. At the same station, a group of soldiers stood to attention as Grand Duke George came up to them. ‘They seemed delighted to talk to me,’ he wrote. ‘I could do anything with these soldiers who now want a republic with a Tsar!’20
For a Grand Duke to think it worth mentioning that soldiers had stood to attention when he approached them, or that one had bowed to Michael, was a measure of just how greatly discipline had deteriorated in the army over the past month. The cause of the collapse in ordinary standards was not the revolution itself, but the notorious Order No 1 which had been issued by the Petrograd Soviet on March 1 before the formation of the Provisional Government. Intended at the time to apply only to the Petrograd garrison, the ‘order’ had become widely interpreted as applying to all troops, including those in the front-line.
Guchkov, war minister in the new government, found out about Order No 1 only after it was published and he had failed to get it rescinded. On March 9, just a week after taking up his post, he had cabled Alekseev in Mogilev: ‘The Provisional Government has no real power of any kind and its orders are carried out only to the extent that this is permitted by the Soviet…in the military department it is possible at present to issue only such orders as basically do not contradict the decisions of the above-mentioned Soviet.’21
The effect was disastrous, for it essentially made officers subservient to the dictates of ‘soldier committees’ established in every military formation, which took away the control of arms from officers, and in some instances dictated what military action might, or might not, be taken against the enemy.
Off-duty soldiers were to be treated as civilians, with no requirement to salute or stand to attention; officers were ‘prohibited’ from speaking to soldiers ‘rudely’. In some units, ‘soldier committees’ insisted on electing their own officers, and expelling those they judged to be too strict or who were suspected of wanting to get on with the war. No wonder, then, that there was no place in this new ‘democratic people’s army’ for Michael or any other Grand Duke, including ‘Uncle Nikolasha’, reappointed Supreme Commander by Nicholas before he abdicated. The new government had simply sacked him.22
Paléologue estimated that there were well over a million deserters roaming Russia. ‘Units have been turned into political debating societies,’ reported the British military observer Alfred Knox after a tour of the northern front. Front-line infantry refused to allow the artillery to shoot at the enemy in case the enemy shot back, and fraternised daily with the Germans facing them. As for the troops in Petrograd, ‘the tens of thousands of able-bodied men in uniform who saunter about the streets without a thought of going to the front…will be a disgrace for all-time to the Russian people and its government’.23
Michael thought the same, and said so in a letter to a British friend, Major Simpson. ‘I want you to know that I am very much ashamed of my countrymen, who are showing too little patriotism ever since the revolution, and who are forgetting their agreement with the Allies, who have done so much to help them. But nonetheless I hope that the return of their good feelings will prevent them becoming traitors.’24
One consolation for Michael was that his own Savage Division had remained immune to the breakdown in discipline. Officers and men were as rock-steady after the revolution as they had been before. He would also have been proud to know that when an officer returned from Petrograd to his Muslim regiment, he found that ‘one question seemed to interest the men most — the fate of Grand Duke Michael’. When he replied that he was in Gatchina and that he was ‘safe for the moment’ the men would shake their heads and mumble, ‘Allah preserve him — he is a real dzhigit. Why didn’t he come to us when it all happened: we would never have given him up.’25
SITTING in Michael’s house, Grand Duke George decided that he could no longer stand living in this new Russia. He had accepted the emergence of the new government ‘but what he had seen after that,’ he wrote to his wife in England, ‘is enough to make your hair stand on end. I would like to leave the country at once.’ He was also tiring of Gatchina: ‘Misha is so nice but his wife is so vengeful about the Romanovs’. 26 George was not sure how much more he could take of her outbursts.
His natural hope was that he would go to England, where his wife, the daughter of the late King George of Greece, had been stranded since the outbreak of war. Accordingly, three weeks after the new government came into being, he went to see Buchanan to seek permission to travel to England.
Although he was not directly connected to the British royals, his wife Marie was a niece of the Dowager Queen Alexandra, as was Michael. So, in the hope of increasing his chances, he told Buchanan that Michael was also keen on going back to his waiting estate in Sussex. He told Buchanan that he saw no hope for Russia with the Soviet pulling the strings. ‘Everything was being confiscated…and to think that these brutes will probably govern the country…it will become a country of savages…every decent person will leave.’27
George’s inclusion of Michael as being his co-applicant was not entirely as he presented it to Buchanan. Walking in the palace park, George had talked to Michael about getting away, and Michael had told him that he was also thinking of going to London. The difference between the two was that George wanted to get out altogether, whereas Michael was thinking only of a short trip, without his family, and with the intention of getting back as soon as he could.
The reason in his case was that, freed of all responsibility, Natasha had urged him to get specialist treatment for his ‘damned stomach pains’ which had so often laid him low in the past. There had been previous discussions in the last couple of years about having treatment in Britain but because of his military duties it had been ‘impossible for him to get to the great specialists who could have dealt with it radically,’ his stepdaughter Tata recalled28. Now, with time on his hands, Natasha saw the chance for him to get the treatment he needed.
In those early days of the new government, Michael assumed that there would be no difficulty in getting permission to go abroad for a few weeks perhaps. After all, he would be leaving his wife and family behind, and that in itself would be sufficient surety that he would be coming back. The Soviet might bark protests, but surely Kerensky would satisfy them that it was for genuine medical treatment, and nothing more than that. In the event the refusal he feared did not come from the Soviet, but from his cousin King George V at Buckingham Palace. The king had shut the door on any Romanovs coming to Britain. He had enough problems with his own throne.
THE Romanov who posed the greatest difficulty for King George was ex-Tsar Nicholas, notwithstanding the close family ties and long friendship, and the loyalty he had shown as an ally. His fall from power had been welcomed by liberals worldwide — by American President Woodrow Wilson as well as by British prime minister Lloyd George. But liberal sentiment was not the problem. ‘Bloody Nicholas’ was a hated figure among British socialists, holding as they did an idealised view of the Russian revolution; and what they were not prepared to accept was any idea that he might be offered refuge in Britain.
On March 9, six days after his abdication, Nicholas had returned to Tsarskoe Selo, escorted by Duma deputies on his imperial train. With that he began what was in effect a prison sentence. He and his family — the children no less than their parents — were confined to their apartments in the palace and restricted for exercise to a small area of the park outside. They were guarded day and night, and while the bayonets were protection from potential attacks by Soviet extremists they were also a bar to the outside world. The family were captives, under threat that they face worse than house arrest. The Soviet continued to clamour for their confinement in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul.