The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (37 page)

Unlike his brother held in close confinement under heavy guard in Ekaterinburg, Michael was free to go anywhere in town and meet anyone. The Cheka knew where he was at 11 o’clock in the morning, but otherwise there was no watch on him, and with the town so crowded there was little they could do to check out the papers of everyone; moreover, that would have done little to help them.

Plotters would make sure they had the right papers — or least papers that looked right — and a plausible story to go with them. Mr O’Brien and Mr Hess could be anyone. They came, they went, and the Cheka was none the wiser.

Colonel Znamerovsky certainly had ideas of escape, and given the worsening position in Perm it would be odd if he had not; with good reason he feared that the ‘Motovilikha workmen might be goaded into violence’.
⁸
The problem was not escape in itself, but making good that escape by getting out of Perm to safety.

Curious messages arrived at the
Korolev Rooms
in those anxious days; two survive, though their meaning is lost.
The mignonette is not a flower of brilliant beauty, but its fragrance is divine,
says one. The other is equally mysterious:
Turkeys are yours.
⁹

On Tuesday May 28, a week after Michael’s first visit to the Cheka, the city was declared to be ‘in a state of war’.

THE Czech threat had also heightened fears among the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg, half-way between Perm and Chelyabinsk, and therefore at even greater risk of finding itself under attack. Nicholas and Alexandra had been transferred there from Tobolsk four weeks earlier, arriving on April 30. They had been taken to the ominously-named ‘House of Special Purpose’ — formerly, until they seized it, the two-storey home of a wealthy local merchant, Nikolai Ipatev. Their five children, kept behind because Alexis had been ill, rejoined them three weeks later.

The house had been hidden from curious eyes by the erection of a tall wooden fence on all sides. Five rooms on the upper floor, their window-panes painted white so that no one could see in or out, were to serve as prison for the family. The lower floor became a guardroom. Other than being allowed to walk in the garden in the afternoon, the family spent their days confined to their rooms, with nothing to do except to read and sew and make up their own games to pass the slow days. It was tedious, humiliating, and with their Red Guards marching to and fro as they pleased, deliberately oppressive.

But they were not the only Romanov captives in Ekaterinburg. Alexandra’s sister Ella, aged 54, was there also, confined in a hotel along with Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich, the three grown-up sons of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who had died in 1915, and, the youngest of the group, Vladimir Paley, the 21-year-old half-brother of Grand Duke Dimitri. They were allowed no contact with Ipatev House, and Alexandra was never told that her sister was in the town.

The locally-based but powerful Ural Regional Soviet — commanding Perm as well as Ekaterinburg — had no intention of evacuating Nicholas and his family, notwithstanding the threat from the Czechs. With the railway line to Moscow blocked at Chelyabinsk, their options were limited in any event. What to do with the family would be a decision they were not ready to make.

However, at the end of May their second group of six Romanov captives were told that they were being moved ‘for safety’ to Alapaevsk, a bleak mining town some 180 miles to the north-east of Ekaterinburg, and roughly the same distance from Perm. There they would be confined in a small simply-furnished schoolhouse, with no more than five or six rooms, guarded by Latvians and local Red Guards. They were allowed to walk into the town, and talk to locals, but in the evenings there was nothing to do but sit in their rooms, and pass the time as best they could. It was a dreary existence, in which one day was indistinguishable from the next; with no prospect of escape, they could only endure the grinding monotony in the hope that somehow better times lay ahead.

Had they known of it, they would have been astonished at the freedom enjoyed by Michael — and the seeming concern of the Bolsheviks to treat him as they treated no other of their Romanov prisoners. Nights at the opera, dinner parties with friends, shopping in town, his own staff of retainers — that was a privileged world they could barely imagine still existed. On the face of it, and whatever the reason for his special treatment, Michael was a very lucky man indeed.

Sadly, that luck was about to run out.

AS Ella and the other Romanovs in her group were preparing for their move to Alapaevsk, Michael noted in his diary that ‘it is difficult to work out what is going on, but something major is brewing’.
¹⁰
There were rumours everywhere as he walked about town, heads still bowed as he passed by. A few days later, on Monday June 3, he wrote to Natasha to set out his views on his own position, his spirits low.

‘My dearest sweetheart, my own darling Natasha…it is now 16 days since you went away. I can’t describe how I feel— depressed and desperate from all the surroundings here, from this dreadful town where I am in absolute uncertainty and living an aimless life. Why do I write this when you know it so well yourself!’ One practical complaint was that the
Korolev Rooms
were becoming increasingly expensive, and a drain on his reserves of cash. ‘The price for the rooms is going up all the time and the cook serves us with enormous bills,’ he added.

The good news was that he had found an apartment at 212 Ekaterinskaya Street with ‘a nice view from the balcony over the river’.
¹¹
That would save money, for it was privately owned by his friends the Tupitsins, and the rent would be almost nominal. It would be free in a couple of weeks, and when Natasha could get back to Perm it would be a home for them. Given the military situation he feared that ‘we will not be able to see each other for another two months, which would be dreadful’, though if matters improved, ‘I will hope that you can come here sooner’.

To this letter he added a separate postscript, jokily headlining it as
The Recent Political Review
and signing off as
Correspondent-on-Tour.

Everything here is outwardly calm, but the authorities admit that things are rather acute and serious. We have to continue to give our signatures daily in the Committee of ‘Charms’. In the town squares the railwaymen and party-workers are receiving military training, drill and similar body exercises…The town is full of rumours and disturbed by news that in the east — not very far away, in ‘Katia’s Burg’ [Ekaterinburg] there are activists of either ‘Czech-Slovaks’ or ‘Slovak-Czechs’…What their further plans are, nobody knows, but our town is now declared under military law.
¹²

Shortly after sending off this letter Michael suffered another bout of his ‘damned stomach pains’, the first for some time. Next day he went as usual to report to the Cheka, and ‘had a bit of a run in with one of the “comrades” there who was very rude to me’.
¹³
The ‘comrade’ was Gavriil Myasnikov, former chairman of the Motovilikha Soviet, who had been appointed ten days earlier to the Perm Cheka, taking over responsibility for dealing with ‘counter-revolutionaries’.
¹⁴

With his arrival, the local Cheka changed from being offensively officious to menacing. Before the 1917 February Revolution Myasnikov had spent four years in a labour camp for terrorist acts. In the six years before that he had been arrested and imprisoned for various violent crimes, his life a series of escapes, periods in hiding, and prison until in 1913 he went to a labour camp.
¹⁵
Now 29, Myasnikov hated what Michael represented and bitterly resented the freedom he was allowed in Perm.

Among his Bolshevik members in Motovilikha there had been fierce criticism of the benign treatment afforded Michael and the way in which the ‘bourgeoisie’ would bow to him in the street, and lay flowers in his path when he went to the Cathedral.

There had been nothing Myasnikov could do about that from Motovilikha, but now as head of a Cheka department he was determined to come down hard on Michael and show him who was master in Perm.

A fellow Bolshevik, the secretary of the Perm Party Committee, thought Myasnikov to be ‘a bloodthirsty and embittered man, and not altogether sane…’
¹⁶
Other local Bolsheviks were also frightened of him, believing him capable of utter ruthlessness. In turn, he suspected some members of the Perm Soviet of being in awe of Michael and too ready to protect him. He was also convinced that there is ‘an organisation of officers attempting to liberate him’.
¹⁷

There appears to have been some effort by the ‘moderates’ to remove Myasnikov from the city Cheka, for only a week after his appointment they tried to get rid of him by ‘promoting’ him to the Ural Regional Cheka in Ekaterinburg. But after he refused to go, the appointment went to the local Cheka chairman, F. N. Lukoyanov
^,18
whose removal left Myasnikov more powerful than before. Lukoyanov was no saint; Myasnikov was a cold-blooded killer.

Michael, of course, knew nothing of Myasnikov other than he was rude and unpleasant; after his first ‘run in’ with him at the ‘Committee of Charms’ he simply shrugged off the row and went off on the Kama in a motor boat. In the afternoon he had ‘wonderful coffee and cake’ with the landlady at the
Korolev Rooms
, and in the evening walked to the City Garden to listen to a string orchestra.
¹⁹

What troubled him more was that over the next three days he would spend much of his days in bed, suffering from stomach pains. On Saturday, June 8, ‘I ate nothing after midday because I was in pain all the time’. On Sunday he ‘spent the whole day in bed by the window’ and in the evening Znamerovsky arrived ‘and told me much of interest about rumours circulating in the city’.
²⁰

On Monday he was on his feet all day ‘but felt very poorly’; he also had a telegram from Natasha to report that she had arrived back in Gatchina from Moscow ‘last Wednesday’ after two weeks of fruitlessly banging on doors in her efforts to have him released. She saw no hope of that now, but she would be cheered by news that he had found an apartment. At least they would have somewhere to live together when next she could get to Perm.

The following day, Tuesday, Michael felt much better and the pains were ‘not as intense and did not last long’. Znamerovsky with Michael’s godson Nagorsky came to tea, and at 10 p.m. Nagorsky popped back to say goodbye , for as Michael wrote in his diary next morning, ‘he is going to Petrograd today.’
²¹

It was Wednesday June 12. The last day of Michael’s life.

MICHAEL could not have known it, but he had been secretly ‘sentenced to death’ a few days earlier. There was no signed order and no paper trail to identify the names of those who decided his fate. In Perm itself, where the murder necessarily had to take place, there would be attempts many years later to pretend that it was entirely a local decision, taken under the pressure of the immediate threat from the Czechs and ‘Whites’ — ex-Tsarist officers and soldiers who had declared their own war on the Reds and were advancing from the east. But Perm was less at risk than Ekaterinburg or Alapaevsk, both of which were far nearer to the approaching enemy. Moreover, it would be another five weeks — July 17/18 —before the Ural Regional Soviet, which commanded all, would order the deaths of Nicholas and his family, and the other six Romanovs held in Alapaevsk. The decision to ‘execute’ Michael on June 12 was not therefore for the same reasons as the others. Moreover, officially, Michael was not to be killed at all — he was to escape.

Escape? That was its own proof that Moscow and not the mindless thugs in the Perm Cheka, or their counterparts in Ekaterinburg, were behind his murder. The local Bolsheviks were well able to kill Michael in secret; it was far beyond their wit to understand why, having done so, they should then promote afterwards the story that he had escaped — a story that could only, on the face of it, encourage the very counter-revolutionaries Michael’s death was supposed to dismay. Why kill him and then hand the enemy a propaganda victory by telling them he was alive, free, and had outwitted his captors?

The Kremlin knew perfectly well the purpose of that — wanting him dead, but also wanting him alive. Confusion in the ranks of their enemies suited them well, and unlike the men in the Urals they faced west, not east; the Germans were almost on their doorstep. In June 1918, with the British driven back to the sea, and a German army approaching Paris, Berlin could be optimistic about success in the West — if not victory, then forcing an armistice which would leave them a free hand in the East. For its part, Moscow could be in no doubt what that would mean for them, and possibly sooner rather than later.

After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1917, imperial Germany made very clear what its ambitions were in Russia. Monarchy was to be the natural order and a republic unthinkable. Poland in September 1917 had been declared an independent kingdom and a three-man Regency was established while Germany and Austria tried to agree on who would get the crown; the most popular candidate was the Austrian archduke Charles Stephen, in that he was a Catholic, spoke Polish, had two Polish sons-in-laws. The three former Russian Baltic states —Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania— were declared to be Grand Duchies, though in the summer of 1918 Lithuania would go on to declare itself a kingdom, electing as sovereign the Württemburg Duke Wilhelm of Urach; Finland became independent in December 1917 with the help of 40,000 German troops and would shortly elect the Kaiser’s brother-in-law Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse-Cassel as king — though in the event neither would ever reign.