CHELYABINSK was the junction for the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok; the Czechs were former prisoners-of-war who had agreed to change sides and fight their old masters, the Austro-Hungarians. Under the terms of the peace treaty between Russia and Germany they had been released from their camps and were travelling to Vladivostok, with the intention that they would then be shipped out to join the Allied armies. Under the same treaty, Austrian prisoners-of-war were being shipped westwards to rejoin their army. The two sides came up against each other when their respective trains met at Chelyabinsk. An Austrian soldier threw a slab of concrete at the jeering Czechs, injuring one of them. The Czechs lynched the offender, and when the local Bolsheviks attempted to intervene the Czechs took over the town. Shortly, the entire 50,000-strong Czech Legion, strung out along the line to Vladivostok, would turn and decide to fight the Bolsheviks, adding a new and dangerous dimension to the civil war being waged elsewhere in Russia.
The news brought panic to the Perm Bolsheviks. Only a day’s journey from Chelyabinsk, the fear was that the Czechs would move on them next. For Michael the question was how the Bolsheviks would then react, and the answer to that was that the quicker Natasha was out of the city the better. The first available train was expected in Perm on Saturday morning, May 18. She had to be on it.
On their last day together, on Friday the day before her she left, they took an afternoon stroll, and then had a quiet and gloomy dinner in the hotel before Natasha packed to go home. ‘It is very sad to be left alone again,’ wrote Michael in his diary that night.34
Next morning, miserable at parting, but little knowing that they would never see each other again, they left the hotel at 9.30 a.m. and took a cab to the station. ‘We waited for a long time for the train on the platform there because the Siberian Express was late…Natasha found a seat in a small compartment of the international carriage, sharing with another lady.’ The train left at 12.10 p.m. He stood staring down the line as the train pulled out and waited until it was out of sight. He took a cab back to the hotel, and that night he wrote in his diary that ‘it has become so sad and so empty now that Natasha has gone, everything seems different and even the rooms have changed…’35
BEFORE leaving Perm Natasha made clear that she would be going back to fight for his release from exile. If Perm was no longer a safe place to keep an ex-Tsar, then what was he doing there? He should be sent home again, or if that was out of the question, Moscow would be better than Perm. It was an argument she saw no point in making to Uritsky in Petrograd; she would go to Moscow and bang on Lenin’s desk again.
After his move to Moscow on March 10, Lenin made the Kremlin his seat of government, choosing for himself one of the buildings of the old Court of Chancellery, opposite the Arsenal, taking a five-roomed apartment on the second floor, with offices on the same floor. The Kremlin bells now played the Internationale instead of God Save the Tsar, and the double-headed Romanov eagles mounted on the gates had been stripped of their crowns, but otherwise it was the same Kremlin Natasha knew well from her childhood.
Arriving in Moscow she went directly to her parents’ apartment at 6 Vozdvizhenkan, only a few hundred yards from the Troitsky Gate and the Kremlin immediately beyond. They were both relieved and alarmed to have her home again — relieved because she had returned safely, alarmed because of her determination to challenge Lenin head-on. ‘They’ll never let you in’, was their view.
With guards blocking entry to the Troitsky Gate and on every building within the Kremlin, entry without authority or permit was impossible. The Kremlin was a fortress, and the Bolsheviks intended to keep it that way. However, ‘impossible’ was not a term which Natasha recognised. Somehow, one set of guards passed her through to the next set of guards, so confident her manner, so persuasive her claim that she had an appointment with Comrade Lenin.
Finding Natasha yet again at his desk, Lenin was no more forthcoming than he had been at the Smolny.36 It was not his decision. She left his office empty-handed, but refusing to give up she then went on to badger other members of the Bolshevik regime, among them Trotsky — who had been ‘ill-tempered and answered rudely’ when tackled by Natasha in Petrograd.37 He was no better tempered this time.
One by one the doors opened then closed after her, leaving her to return back to her parents with nothing to show for her desperate persistence.
‘She imagined that personal intercession with the Red chieftains would move them to let him go,’ commented The Times man Wilton. ‘Of course, it was an illusion excusable only in a distracted wife’.38
In the early summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks faced too many threats to think it was safe to release Michael. On the contrary, what they were going to do, without the world finding out about it, was to murder him, and murder him long before any of the other Romanovs. The last Emperor was to die first.
21. EITHER HIM OR US
ON Tuesday, May 21, as Natasha was heading into Moscow, Michael and Johnson appeared by order at 33 Petropavlovskaya–Okhanskaya, the Perm offices of the sinister Cheka. Until then they had reported only to the local militia, next door to their hotel. However, because of the growing Czech threat, the Perm Soviet decided that it could no longer be responsible for Michael’s ‘safety’; responsibility was transferred to the provincial Cheka.1
The change seems to have coincided with a resolution by the workers in nearby Motovilikha that if the Perm Soviet did not arrest Michael, they would ‘settle with him themselves’.2 The Bolsheviks at Motovilikha, some two and a half miles away, were largely employed in the huge government munitions factory there, and were noticeably more militant than those in Perm. In his diary afterwards, Michael wrote that at the Cheka offices ‘I was given a piece of paper ordering me to go there every day at 11 o’ clock (good people, tell me what this means)’.3
The switch to the Cheka seemed at first merely an irritation. Whereas at the militia office Michael had simply popped his head around the door at whatever time suited him, now the officious Cheka demanded that he present himself at precisely the stated time; they also took delivery of all letters and telegrams to him, and read them before handing them over.4 It was an unpleasant reminder of his real position.
Nevertheless Michael continued otherwise to go about the town without restriction. In the week after Natasha left Perm, he listened to a string orchestra in the City Garden, saw ‘a dreadful farce’ in his box at the Opera House, spent an evening at the Triumph Cinema, visited a waxworks exhibition, and went in search of walking boots, buying a pair of ‘simple soldiers’ lace-up boots’.5
At one of the shops in Siberia Street the manager asked him why it was, in view of his comparative freedom, that he did not escape. Michael only laughed. ‘Where would someone as tall as I am go? They would find me immediately.’6
The Cheka was not quite so sure of that. Perm was now more crowded, as thousands of people trying to make their way eastwards found themselves stranded in the town, with the railway line to Chelyabinsk cut. Among these unexpected newcomers were ‘two Americans’ who called on Michael after dinner on Saturday, May 25. Identified by Michael only as ‘Mr O’Brien’ and ‘Mr Hess’,7 they were the kind of visitors the Cheka looked upon with suspicion, as possible messengers for plotters intent on rescuing him.