Danish help did not stop there. The embassy in Petrograd decided to ‘rent’ part of Michael’s house in Gatchina to protect it from the attentions of hooligans. Every day, to keep up the pretence, two Danish officials would go there to make it appear that they were in residence. To add further protection, a Danish flag fluttered above the house.21
BY mid-April, 1918 — and before son George was to be smuggled out of Russia into Denmark — Michael’s position had begun to look more than tolerable, compared with what had gone before. The latest orders from Petrograd, signed by both Bonch-Bruevich and Cheka boss Uritsky, were that he and Johnson ‘are entitled to live in freedom under the surveillance of the local Soviet authorities’;22 surveillance amounted only to a requirement that Michael reported each day to the militia headquarters next-door to the hotel — irksome but a very minor inconvenience in practice. Otherwise he was at liberty to do as he pleased.
He had tagged himself as the ‘Prisoner of Perm’ in a photograph taken of him with Johnson in a muddy street just after his release from prison, where he had grown a beard which he vowed not to remove until he was entirely freed,23 but he was more cheerful now than at any time since his arrest on January 5.
His obvious popularity among the townspeople at large did not endear him to the more fervent members of the Perm Soviet, but for the moment they did no more than grumble about it.
One ‘refugee’ from nearby Ekaterinburg and who also had booked into the Korolev Rooms remembered that ‘I was at first afraid of staying there’ because the presence of Michael ‘would attract the attention of the Soviet authorities’ but he quickly discovered that Michael, seemingly blessed by Moscow, was ‘at complete liberty and walked around the town without anyone following. Even the local Soviet commissar who ran the hotel as if he owned it, was careful to treat Michael ‘quite correctly’.24
Sometimes in a shabby raincoat, tweed cap and boots, and on fine days in a grey suit, soft hat and carrying a stick,25 Michael became a familiar figure as he strolled around town. Princess Putyatina in Petrograd would hear reports that people meeting him in the street ‘treated him with great respect’ and they brought him ‘all sorts of delicacies’. The Times man Robert Wilton, in Perm some months later, would report that his rooms ‘were always full of provisions’. He also learned that when out walking Michael ‘found himself running the gauntlet of popular ovations’.26
Michael, reviewing his position in those early days of relative freedom could afford a degree of optimism. With Johnson, Chelyshev and Borunov there as practical support, and still with enough cash to meet his needs despite the loss of his income, all that he now wanted was for Natasha to join him as quickly as possible. As she badgered the Petrograd authorities for a permit to travel to Perm, his main concern was finding an apartment in which they could live out their exile. However, that proved more difficult than he had thought. ‘We can live in our hotel,’ he cabled her towards the end of April. ‘Waiting impatiently.’27
What Natasha had not dared tell him, in telegrams and letters that could be read by Cheka agents or informers, was that she had sent little George out of Russia. Those were anxious days until she heard from the Danish embassy in Petrograd, firstly that he had arrived safely in Berlin, and then finally in early May that he was in the palace in Copenhagen. With that worry off her shoulders, she was free and cabled him to say that she was on her way, and would be in Perm in time for Easter. That would be very late this year —Good Friday was May 10 — because the Russian Orthodox Church continued to use the old-style Julian calendar. Delighted, Michael cabled back: ‘My darling, beloved and very dearest Natasha, thank God that we, nevertheless, are able to celebrate Easter together, if not at home.’28
With Tata being looked after in Gatchina by Princess Vyazemskaya, Natasha arrived, after a two-day journey from Petrograd, with her friend Maggie Abakanovich and Prince Putyatin as escort, though both would return after a few days, their duty done. On the evening of Easter Saturday, May 11, they went to a packed 1,500-seat opera house where the French actress Beauregard was playing in Dream of Love. Michael’s party included two of Perm’s best-known society figures, Sergei and Olga Tupitsin, neither of whom had anything other than contempt for the Bolsheviks; afterwards Beauregard joined them in their crimson-and-gold box,29 with the ever-elegant Natasha holding court, as oblivious to the sullen stares of the new Bolshevik ‘aristocracy’ as previously she had been to the disapproving eyes of imperial society.
On Sunday they went to the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul; the scene was one which outraged the Bolshevik workers at the arms factory at nearby Motovilikha. ‘The blatantly monarchist ceremonies of the bourgeoisie and the new Tsar-Saviour’s almost daily procession to the cathedral along roads covered with carpets and fresh flowers angered the working class,’ Cheka agent A. A. Samarin complained bitterly.30
To men like these it was as if Citizen Romanov was not ‘the former Grand Duke’ but treated as if he were actually the Emperor. They sneeringly referred to him as ‘His Imperial Majesty’ 31 but yet seemed unable to do anything about it other than shout furiously amongst themselves.
With Natasha’s arrival she and Michael began immediately the hunt for an apartment. During that first weekend together they looked at various places, including an apartment and a ‘nice house’ in the same street as their hotel. As Michael had said, it was not easy; however, what was encouraging was that acquaintances from Gatchina — Colonel Peter Znamerovsky and his wife — had found a good apartment at 8 Kungurskaya Street and it heartened Natasha.32
Znamerovsky, former commandant of the Gatchina railway gendarmerie, had been arrested shortly after Michael, and likewise exiled to Perm. They would become close friends, bound as they were by common misfortune.
Inevitably, with Natasha in town, there was not an evening when they were not being entertained, for there was no shortage of invitations from the ‘smart set’ in Perm, only too happy to play host and hostess not just to the Grand Duke but to the woman who had been talked about ever since their runaway marriage. Everyone was curious to meet her and to have Michael and Natasha at their dinner table, or to be invited to join those who did. Each day was as crowded as the next. There were also plenty of public occasions, when the two would be ogled by the many, not the few.
Michael and Natasha went back twice to the opera house in the coming week, to a piano recital and to a concert by a group of artists from the Maryinski, the imperial theatre in the capital before the Soviet had struck that word from the dictionary. Each time, Michael and Natasha sat in the same left-side box, as if that now belonged to them.
On other evenings in that crowded week they gave dinner parties for the Tupitsins and the Znamerovskys, and during the day they went for walks along the river bank, or strolled into the marketplace on the Monastyrskaya and into some of those shops still open for business.33 Eyes followed them everywhere; people eagerly ran forward to catch even a glimpse of them as they walked by.
Then, suddenly, it was all over. The real world caught up with them again. A large armed force of Czechs had taken control of Chelyabinsk, a town 390 miles to the south. The local Bolsheviks, alarmed by the unexpected emergence of a new enemy so near to them, took fright, and in so doing forced Michael and Natasha to the realisation that their hopes of making a new life for themselves in Perm had ended. Some two weeks after arriving in Perm, Michael insisted that Natasha had to leave, and leave urgently, while she still could.