The following day, Thursday, Natasha and Princess Putyatina returned again, but were allowed to see Michael for only thirty minutes. Desperate to do something, Natasha decided to go directly to Lenin, who was somewhere in the same building. ‘Noticing that there was a sentry in front of one of the doors, we presumed that must be his office. Natasha brusquely opened the door without giving the sentry time to bar the way,’ and marched in. Lenin, sitting at his desk, looked up startled, as Natasha firmly closed the door behind her.
The confused sentry outside made no attempt to follow her in, though he did bar the princess from doing so. She collapsed on a bench. ‘I do not know how long I waited, but I do know that I got up several times and paced the corridor nervously’. At last the door opened and Natasha peeped out, beckoning her in. The sentry hesitated, but stepped aside as the princess swept by him.
Natasha was standing in the office on her own. Lenin had disappeared through another door, promising to look into the matter, but ‘saying that it not only depended on him’. After a long wait, the inner door opened and instead of Lenin his friend Bonch-Bruevich walked in, nodded a greeting, and tried to sound reassuring. The question of Michael’s arrest would, he promised, be reviewed later in the day. No, he could not say more. 32
It was all they could get out of him, and with that Natasha and the princess left and walked back into the capital. Was there hope? They could only reassure each other through their tears that there must be.
That evening, as Natasha waited anxiously for news, twenty-four party leaders met at the Smolny, among them Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the man who would one day succeed him. Fearing that Petrograd was too near the German lines, and the counter-revolutionary movement in Finland, the meeting was to finalise the decision to move to the greater safety of Moscow.
One of their last decisions was to decide the fate of the ‘former Grand Duke M. A. Romanov’. Given his prominence, and the potential threat he posed as a rallying point for counter-revolutionaries, not least the monarchists, the meeting was in no doubt that he could not be left behind. The answer was that he was to be exiled ‘until further notice’ to the distant Urals. Johnson was also to be exiled, but ‘shall not be accommodated in the same city’. The arrangements were ‘entrusted to Comrade Uritsky’.33
Next morning, Friday, a protesting Natasha was refused permission to see Michael. With that she and Princess Putyatina hurried away to find Uritsky. It was a very long walk back into the centre of the capital, and down to 2 Gorokhovaya Street at the bottom of the Nevsky Prospekt; the building they were looking for, formerly the offices of the City Governor, beside the Alexander Gardens and opposite the Admiralty, was now the headquarters of the Cheka.
Natasha waited by the steps, and the princess went inside to find Uritsky. He was in his office, and motioned her in, telling her that she had come ‘just at the right time’. Michael, he told her, was to be exiled to Perm, a thousand miles away.
Shocked, the princess hurried out to the waiting Natasha, and broke the news. ‘It was a terrible blow, but she bore it with courage and resignation’.34
Late that night Michael sat down in his prison room at the Smolny and wrote his farewell letter to Natasha.
Uritsky has just read to us the resolution of the Soviet of People’s Commissars ordering our immediate move to Perm. They gave us half an hour to be ready… everything has happened so unexpectedly… Don’t be disheartened, my dearest — God will help us to go through this dreadful ordeal. I kiss and most tenderly embrace you. Your Misha.35
At 1 a.m. that Saturday, March 11, Michael and Johnson were driven out of the Smolny through the darkened, freezing and snow-covered streets to the dimly-lit and near-deserted Nicholas station. After three shivering hours, with no means of keeping warm, they were marched to the train which would take them into exile and to a fate it was best they could not know.
20. PRISONER OF PERM
IN peacetime the twice-daily standard trains from the capital took two days to reach Perm, and the twice-weekly Siberian express got there in 37 hours. The train on which Michael and Johnson left at 4 a.m. that Saturday would take eight days, crawling along at less than five miles per hour. By Tuesday, and after some 80 hours, they had got only as far as Vologda, 371 miles from Petrograd.1 The weather was bitter and they were housed in a battered carriage attached to a freight train, sitting in a grubby unheated compartment grandly marked ‘First Class’ but which had all its windows broken or missing.2
The armed six-man escort — Latvians commanded by a Russian — treated them with indifference at first but by Sunday evening, impressed at finding that their imperial prisoner made no complaint, their attitude changed. As they were getting ready to settle down to sleep, ‘two of the escort even took off their coats and hung them over the windows to keep out the draughts,’ Johnson reported later.3 They began to address Michael as ‘Michael Aleksandrovich’ and after that ‘they did their best to take care of us’.4
As the train dragged itself into Vologda, the guards agreed when Michael asked for permission to send a telegram. It was as reassuring as it could be, and Johnson took it for despatch to a frantic Natasha. Everybody well. Fellow-travellers are nice. Moving very slowly by freight train. At his final meeting with Uritsky he had been told that Natasha and the family could travel to see him whenever she liked. In his telegram he said ‘it will be quite impossible to travel with children…Must take food for entire journey.’5 That said much about what might be expected at the stopping stations en route; even at Vologda, the first large town they had reached, there was barely anything to buy in the station restaurant.
What irked Michael particularly was that he and Johnson were to be separated when they got to Perm. At their next stop at the small station of Sharya the following evening he fired off a protest telegram to Lenin, using his ill-health as justification, and asking him to revoke that particular order. He did.6
Finally, on Sunday March 19, the train reached Perm at the end of its eight-day journey and Michael and Johnson — unshaven, filthy, exhausted and ravenous — were taken under guard to the Hermitage Hotel where they were given a small room in which they could at last wash, and look forward to sleeping in a bed.7
Perm, with a population then of 62,000, was the capital of a regional government of the same name, which also included Ekaterinburg, 235 miles to the south-east. The gateway to Siberia, and standing above the broad River Kama, it was normally a thriving city with 19 churches, a new university, and fittingly, since it was the birthplace of Diaghilev, boasted the largest theatre outside Petrograd and Moscow. There were worse places to be in exile; Michael was resolved to make the best of it.
The first shock came two days later when the local authorities, having had no instructions about Michael, decided to put him in prison, and keep him in solitary confinement, a move explained away by a Bolshevik newspaper in Petrograd which said that he had ‘become insane’ — a story published worldwide and reported even in The Times in London.8 Johnson was also put behind bars.
Before being taken away, Michael had been allowed to send a brief telegram to Natasha, telling her that he was ‘to be kept until further notice in solitary confinement’.9 He also managed to dash off three other telegrams — to Petrograd Commissars Bonch-Bruevich, Lunarcharsky and Uritsky — demanding that the local Soviet be instructed to release him at once. ‘Urgently request issue of directives immediately,’ he wrote on March 20.10