The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (36 page)

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.

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.

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.