For the next three months the Bolsheviks left Michael Romanov in peace. He walked around the town unmolested, with people still bowing to him in the street. What he had not realised was that local volunteers had organised a discreet watch over him in case of trouble, and were also guarding his house against hooliganism.
When he did find out about this private protection, he made it known than he did not need it and that ‘nobody will touch me here. I do not have the right to give orders, but I want the guard to be removed.’21
One change for the better at Gatchina was the appointment of the young Vladimir Gushchik as palace commissar. Destined one day to be a celebrated writer, Gushchik still thought of Michael as a Grand Duke, and he would say of him that he had ‘three rare qualities: kindness, simplicity, and honesty…None of the parties were hostile towards him. Even socialists of all colours treated him with respect…’22
Gushchik became a close friend of Johnson and so trusted that he even became guardian of confidential papers which Michael did not feel it was safe to keep in his house. He proved himself a valuable friend and ally, and did what he could to make life as tolerable as the situation allowed. To protect Michael he would later burn the confidential papers entrusted to him;23 what they would have revealed about Michael and Natasha’s political contacts and activities is unknown.
But that would be later. Outwardly, life in Nikolaevskaya Street had settled down to so ordinary a routine that it might almost have been that the revolution had passed him by. When Christmas came ‘we lit the tree, danced around it, and played cat-and-mouse. The children made masks and danced around the room in a comical way…’ On New Year’s Eve ‘we sat down to eat at 12, not so much to greet the New Year as to say goodbye to damned 1917 which brought so much evil and misfortune to everyone’.24
THE New Year brought no sign that 1918 was going to be any better. The delayed elections for the Constituent Assembly, which the socialists had insisted should go ahead as the price of their support for the Bolsheviks, got them the victory they had expected, with the Bolsheviks capturing less than 25% of the vote and winning only some 170 of the 700-plus seats decided, less than half of those won by the Socialist Revolutionaries, which emerged, with some hundred results still to come in, as the majority party and seemingly destined to become Russia’s first elected government. 25
This was a mandate for a democratic republic, not a constitutional monarchy. Subject to a formal resolution, Michael’s caretaker role as Emperor appeared to be over. But when the Assembly met for its opening session on January 5, the Bolsheviks closed it down that same day by sending in armed and drunken troops, and that was the end of that — the last hope that Russia would decide its own future as Michael had decreed in his Millionnaya Street manifesto nine months earlier.
Two prominent liberal members elected to that Assembly — Aleksandr Shingarev and F. F. Kokoshkin, both sometime ministers in the Provisional Government — were murdered immediately afterwards. Russia was no longer a monarchy, a republic, or a democracy; henceforth it was to be ruled by Bolshevik diktat, with opponents shot or arrested. Murder and robbery became commonplace.
For most ordinary people, including Michael’s staff, though not Michael himself, the war had ceased to matter. The very British governess Miss Neame was as patriotic as anyone, but ‘it had come to such a pitch of terror,’ she said later, ‘that we were all praying and waiting anxiously for the arrival of the Germans, as we then knew we would be safe’.26
Fighting their own people, the Bolsheviks could not afford to continue fighting Germany. Over the next two months Michael’s diary would be dominated by the negotiations with the Germans for a separate peace. ‘What a disgrace to Russia!’ he wrote when he first heard of the talks.27 They would stop and start and in the end the peace terms agreed would be worse than the ones first on offer. Signed on March 3 — the Bolsheviks had adopted the Western calendar, February 1, 1918 becoming February 14— the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the war between Russia and Germany, and cleared the way for a civil war. Russians would now concentrate on killing each other.
For the nervous servants at Nikolaevskaya Street, the regret was that the advancing Germans had stopped short of Gatchina. ‘Everyone was in despair,’ wrote Miss Neame. It would quickly prove to be more than justified.
Four days later, at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, March 7, Michael was on his bedroom balcony, overlooking the snow-covered street beyond his garden. It was a beautiful morning, with bright sunshine. Troubled by his ‘damned stomach pains’ he was lying on his couch, beginning his diary for the previous day, noting that he had been playing the guitar in the afternoon. As he started to write: ‘In the evening…’28 he was interrupted by the sight of a group of armed men running up the road towards the house. Minutes later they were on the path, and forcing their way into the house itself.
Michael heard them running up the stairs, and then they were in his bedroom, the officer in charge bursting onto the balcony.29 In his hand he carried an order for the arrest of Michael and Johnson.
The order was signed by Moisei Uritsky, the head of the feared Petrograd Cheka — formally the Extraordinary Commission on the Struggle Against the Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage — and which was designed as an instrument of terror, with powers which in effect made it a law unto itself.
Miss Neame, cowering downstairs, would never forget Michael’s arrest. This time his protestations were ignored. This time there would be no negotiations, no compromises, no acceptance that he could make his own arrangements for accommodation in Petrograd, no opportunity even to pack a bag. He was pulled from his couch, and pushed out to the stairs with shouts and brandished bayonets. The cries of Natasha and the rest of the household were ignored as they were thrust aside, and Michael and Johnson marched down the path and into the trucks which had driven up to the house.
Watching him go, Miss Neame was struck by the ‘sad look in his eyes —so tired and ill, he was hurt at all the injustice’.30 He would never come home ever again.
Driven to the capital, he was taken to the Smolny, once an exclusive girls’ school, a few streets beyond the Tauride Palace and now Bolshevik headquarters. Michael would quickly find that he was not just under arrest as before — he was a prisoner of the revolution.
A distressed Natasha, quickly packing a suitcase, followed Michael to the capital, catching the train, and spending the night at the home of her friend Maggie Abakanovich on the Moika. Having telephoned Millionnaya Street, she met up with Princess Putyatina next morning and together they walked to the grey-painted Smolny. Passing through the colonnaded entrance, past machine-guns and guards with fixed bayonets, they were given permission to see Michael; they found him in a large room, furnished now with eight beds and a few chairs. He was standing in a window recess, talking to Johnson as armed guards stood around, smoking and laughing loudly. When Natasha walked in, he came quickly over to her and ‘kissed her hand without speaking’.31
As they all sat down in the chairs and began talking quietly, a door opened and Uritsky came in, dressed in a leather jacket, high boots and a grey fur hat. Princess Putyatina remembered ‘a man of under-average height, with a prominent, fleshy nose, large lop-ears, small ferrety eyes with an expression of cold cruelty’. He gave a short nod, pulled up another chair, sat down and lit a cigarette. He refused to answer any questions about the reason for Michael’s imprisonment, and after a few vague promises about improving conditions, he got up and left.