The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (35 page)

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

Five days later Michael’s valet, Vasily Chelyshev, and his chauffeur Borunov, who had arrived in Perm on a ‘proper’ train just as Michael was being imprisoned on March 21, reported to Natasha that there had been ‘no reply to the telegrams of our “boss”…very important the local authorities receive directions…’ Chelyshev also told her that ‘Uritsky was being evasive’.
¹¹
Natasha had sent the two men to provide moral and practical support —there would be no car for Borunov to drive — and they had brought clothes, books, and a variety of toilet and medical supplies packed by Natasha, but they were not being allowed to see Michael.
¹²

Natasha banged on doors across Petrograd but it was two long weeks before finally the order came for his release. Robert Wilton,
The Times
man, helpfully filed the story in London, making it difficult for the Comrades to retract that order;
¹³
even so the local Perm Soviet dragged its heels, as if determined to show its independence, continuing to keep Michael in prison while the world was reading on Saturday, April 6, that he was free. It was not until 11 p.m. the following Monday that the prison gates opened and he walked back into the world.
¹⁴

The resourceful Chelyshev had arranged rooms for Michael in the
Korolev Rooms
at the end of Siberia Street not far from the embankment of the Kama river. The handsome three-storey hotel, opened 11 years earlier in 1907, prided itself on providing the most luxurious accommodation in the city. Though taken over by the local Soviet — and renamed
Hotel No.1
— its guests were entitled to a three-course dinner every day, with tea or milk.
¹⁵
The hotel was a long, flat-fronted building painted yellow ochre, with tall arched windows; inside were elegant columns and stucco mouldings.

Michael was given a large room on the first floor, number 21, with a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the busy street outside, and immediately above the main entrance.
¹⁶
It was the very best on offer, and after what Michael had endured, over the past five weeks, a joy to behold. Johnson, Chelyshev and Borunov also found rooms in the same hotel. Once in his room Michael immediately wrote to Natasha.

My very own, dearest Natasha. At last I can write to you openly, as up to now, i.e. up to last night, we were under arrest and all my correspondence was being checked by the local Soviet. I did not want to write letters, knowing they would be read by all and sundry…Yesterday morning we were told that we would be released and we have spent a wearisome day awaiting the results.

Thanks to the insistence of Vasily,, we were at last released at 11 p.m. and went straight to the rooms we have rented in the Korolev Rooms. My head is going round and round — so much I want to tell you, as I have lived through so much in the last five weeks of my arrest.

My dearest Natashechka, I thank you from all my heart for the lovely letters and also for all the trouble you have taken to help me. Thank God, the first step was successful, and we are free. This is already a great relief. The second step would be to get away from here and go home, but I am afraid that this won’t be soon. I am terribly lonely without you, my darling, come here as soon as possible.

As from today, I will start looking for some lodgings for us and as soon as I find something suitable will send you a wire…Adoring you, all yours. Misha.
¹⁷

After five weeks of suffering it was a letter that made the best of the position he was in, and which offered hope that somehow the worst was really over.

THE arrest of Michael was immediate evidence enough for Natasha that the Bolsheviks could not be trusted to leave them alone — and that therefore their son, seven-year-old George, might also be at risk. Arrest a child? She had seen enough of the arbitrary power exercised by the Cheka not to doubt that they might, if it suited them, do just that. Her daughter and Michael’s step-daughter Tata was less of a worry — her birth certificate gave her name as Mamontov, not Romanov, so it was George who had to be sent to safety. But how? Natasha could not go with him, not only because there was little chance of her getting across the frontier, but because she would not leave Michael behind, and no less could she leave Tata. George’s nanny was the British Miss Neame, an enemy alien in German eyes.

The Danes provided the answer. Their embassy was across the road from the Putyatin apartment in Millionnaya Street, and Michael was a cousin and friend of Denmark’s King Christian, so little George was ‘family’. The plan was for George and Miss Neame to travel together on a Red Cross train, with Miss Neame using a false passport in the name of Silldorf, and posing as the wife of a repatriated Austrian officer, with George as her son; a Danish officer would accompany them to Berlin.

It was a daunting prospect; neither Miss Neame or George spoke a word of German, and once on the train they would have to remain absolutely silent. What would happen if they were directly challenged was something that did not bear thinking about.

On March 16, three days before the train carrying Michael reached Perm, Miss Neame and seven-year-old George were taken into Danish protection, and hidden until permission for the journey had been received from Copenhagen.
¹⁸
It was forty days before they were ready to move on April 25.

The ruse worked. The Bolsheviks took no notice of her or George as they passed across the border into German-controlled territory. Arriving safely in Berlin, they were taken immediately to the Danish embassy, where the American-born wife of the Danish ambassador took them into her care. They were there for a week while the ambassador delicately set about the task of disclosing the truth to the German foreign ministry about George and his British nanny, in Berlin on false papers.

The son of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich? That was a matter which went straight to the Kaiser and his brother Prince Henry — married to the sister of both the ex-Empress and Grand Duchess Ella. Whatever was to be said about Natasha, George was their nephew. But that apart, a favour to Michael had potentially strategic benefit. In helping little George there might well be advantage to Germany,

The Kaiser and his High Command intended one day to have a reckoning with the Bolsheviks whom for the moment they had to tolerate. They had sent Lenin back in April 1917 in the hope, now realised, that he and the Bolsheviks could take Russia out of the war, but they had no intention of leaving him or they in power. Berlin’s view was that when the war in the West ended, either with imperial Germany victorious or on terms which left Germany with a free hand in the East, they would turn on the Bolsheviks, clear them out, and re-establish monarchy in Russia. Michael, on all the evidence available, was the Romanov best placed to take back the throne. They needed him.

On the authority of the Kaiser, orders were therefore immediately given that George and his nanny — notwithstanding that she was an enemy alien who ordinarily would have been interned — were to be allowed to go through to Denmark without impediment of any kind. ‘He not only kindly allowed us to go on, but we had a reserved first-class carriage’, an astonished Miss Neame reported afterwards.
¹⁹

Having left Berlin in style, with orders passed forward that they were to cross the frontier ‘without we or our luggage being searched,’ they were met on arrival in Copenhagen by a court official, taken to the palace, and invited to stay with the king and queen. ‘You and the boy must settle down and be happy with us’, King Christian told Miss Neame. ‘I admire you for undertaking such a dangerous journey.’
²⁰

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