The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  But Sir George was adamant: the situation was ‘becoming so serious,’ he telegraphed on 7 January 1917, ‘that it is in my opinion a duty which we owe to the Emperor himself, to Russia, and to ourselves as Russia’s ally, to speak plainly’. Russia was on the brink:

  With the exception of a small clique of interested persons, the whole country is united in opposition to the Emperor’s present policy, which is also condemned by [the] majority of his Ministers … Minister of Foreign Affairs to whom I spoke in private on the subject this morning, begged me to ask for an audience, and said that even if I spoke only in my own name, my support would be most useful at the present moment to those who had already expressed to the Emperor somewhat similar views. The French Ambassador … [said] that a word from our King would be invaluable [my italics].46

  Such was Sir George’s strength of feeling on the matter that he stuck his neck out even further: if officialdom would not allow him, as ambassador, to appeal to the Tsar on behalf of King George and his government, might he be given permission to make an entirely personal approach to the Tsar? He was, he said, ‘quite prepared to assume the whole responsibility for what I may say, and I believe I can put the case in such a way as would not offend the Emperor. The worst that can happen is that I may personally incur His Majesty’s temporary displeasure.’ Buchanan could not emphasise sufficiently the urgent state of affairs:

  All that I ask is that I may be charged with some message from the King, that would show that His Majesty both as the Emperor’s kinsman, and as Russia’s Ally, is seriously preoccupied by the turn which events are taking. I would humbly submit this suggestion for HM’s gracious consideration. Unless the Emperor unexpectedly changes his present attitude, most leading Ministers will resign and it is in my opinion, the psychological moment for us to speak. If we defer doing so, it may be too late, and the consequences may be incalculable.47

  In a telegram sent to Buchanan on 8 January, and in the light of the ambassador’s strong views, Foreign Secretary Balfour withdrew his objection to him seeking an audience with Nicholas. But Balfour was adamant on one thing: he did not wish to ‘press the King to send a private telegram to the Emperor’. ‘The whole subject,’ he stressed, was ‘causing the King very great anxiety’. He relied on Buchanan’s ‘tact and discretion in handling the matter in a way that would not give offence to Nicholas’, which might otherwise do ‘more harm than good’.48

  On 12 January, Buchanan finally had his meeting with the Tsar, but it proved stiff and formal, and Nicholas was more defensive and evasive than ever.49 He adamantly refused to take seriously the talk of revolution. Sir George was horrified, and warned the British government that both the Russian sovereigns seemed ‘possessed of madness and to be wantonly courting disaster’.50

  It is clear from this exchange of telegrams on 7 and 8 January that the British king privately shared Buchanan’s sense of urgency about the security of the Russian throne, but that his government was already setting up barriers to prevent him becoming embroiled in the whole contentious problem. Nevertheless, having been copied in on this latest message from his ambassador, and having read ‘alarming accounts’ of the Romanov family’s involvement in the murder of Rasputin – with or without his government’s advice – King George responded in the only natural way anyone would: as a close blood relative. He had, quite rightly, come to the conclusion that only a personal approach from a family member might, at this critical moment, make his cousin see sense.51 Through his equerry Arthur Davidson, he therefore enlisted his Danish friend Hans Niels Andersen to undertake a special assignment, asking him ‘most earnestly’ if he could persuade King Christian to send him and Prince Valdemar (Christian and Nicholas’s uncle) on a special mission to Petrograd to try to avert what King George saw as ‘the menacing family catastrophe’.52

  In response to the King’s request, Andersen had a private meeting in London with Balfour on 21 January. ‘In the event of a Revolution, or great social upheaval,’ he told Balfour, he did not believe, ‘as most other people do, that the Russian nation is sufficiently united to carry on the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion’, adding a further warning that:

  Germany is watching all that is going on in Russia with the greatest eagerness and delight and … at a suitable moment she will offer Constantinople to Russia as a bribe for a separate peace and ‘standing aside’ for the rest of the war.53

  Andersen was very clear: if there was a revolution, ‘the German task would be comparatively easy’. Russia would be pulled out of the war on the Eastern Front. Such a prospect would present the Allies with a crisis: ‘the whole result of the War is at present literally trembling in the balance owing to what is going on in Russia.’ Through his equerry Davidson, the King underlined the utmost urgency of the Andersen/Valdemar mission, not so much to save Nicholas from himself as to keep Russia in the war.

  The only problem was Alexandra: Andersen was apprehensive that if she were privy to any conversations that he and Valdemar had with Nicholas, their message would be undermined by her negativity and she would persuade her husband otherwise. But perhaps she also needed to ‘hear at first hand of the dangers that threaten the continuance of this Reactionary Regime’. Unless her influence over Nicholas could be ‘deflected into another channel,’ Andersen advised, ‘disaster with all its train of inevitable consequences is almost certain’.54 It was ‘useless’, he told Davidson, to try to preach to Nicholas about constitutional reform and how to run his own government, but he might listen to his uncle, Valdemar, if he spoke to him ‘on family grounds’.55

  As Nicholas’s reign headed towards crisis, family loyalties were the British king’s only hope of salvaging the situation. Unfortunately the reliance on dynastic connections in maintaining peace and stability had already been shown to be ineffectual, with the outbreak of hostilities in 1914; royal families were now fighting each other in a world war, as well as within Russia itself. The situation was critical, as far as King George was concerned. In London, Andersen and Valdemar, having been given the go-ahead by King Christian, prepared to leave for their mission, with Andersen carrying a letter dated 22 January, written on the King’s behalf by Davidson and addressed to British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan. It bore instructions in red ink on the envelope: ‘To be destroyed immediately once read.’ The letter reiterated the King’s concern that the Tsar and Tsaritsa should be made aware ‘that the abyss lies before them’.56

  Unfortunately the letter was never handed over: just as the two men were preparing to leave at the beginning of February, the Germans launched a full-scale submarine blockade of Great Britain. It was too dangerous to travel. Two days later, Sir George Buchanan was telegraphing the King and Cabinet that ‘Alarming reports have reached me from more than one quarter of preparations being made either for a Palace revolution or for assassination in High quarters but I have no confirmation of them.’57 On 10 February, Andersen telegraphed that the ‘Danish minister at Petrograd has reported that there is a plot to remove Czar and either place Grand Duke Alexander [Sandro] on throne or to create republic’.58

  On 27 February, three weeks after the initial shock of the German submarine war had subsided, King George once again telegraphed Hans Niels Andersen about the urgency of his and Valdemar’s mission to Tsar Nicholas.59 But it was too late. Revolution had already broken out on the streets of Petrograd.

  * * *

  The story of King George’s initiative in early 1917, and this aborted act of intercession, has till now been confined to material in the Royal Archives and a brief discussion in Danish sources. It clearly demonstrates that the King was far from indifferent to the plight of his Russian relatives and the impact that their fall from power would have on the war. Perhaps it is time to give him a little more credit, where due.

  * * *

  In a statement made in May 1917 by the Duma president and moderate Mikhail Rodzianko – one of the most able men in Nicholas’s government – we are confronted with the full
horror of Nicholas and Alexandra’s obduracy in the face of imminent disaster. Rodzianko was no monarchist, but he battled away for six years against the Tsar’s resistance, trying to convince him of the pressing need for political concessions, having had a long-held premonition of what was to come. But even he had reached the regretful conclusion that ‘he could not envision the salvation of Russia without a coup’.60 Better the creation of a new government in place of the monarchy than the dangers of out-and-out revolution at a time when Russia was at war:

  I am convinced that, had a responsible ministry been granted on the 25th [February; 10 March NS] and Aleksandra Fedorovna sent to Livadia, the movement would have been stopped and revolution could have been avoided. The popular masses – and everyone agrees with this – were not inclined to excesses. This was the life-saver. Everything could have succeeded if vigorous, legal, and responsible measures had been quickly introduced.61

  * * *

  The ‘catastrophe lurking in the dark’ that Nicholas and Alexandra’s royal relatives had for so long anticipated had finally broken.62

  On 12 March 1917, news was telephoned to Tsarskoe Selo from Petrograd that key regiments – the Preobrazhenskys, Pavlovlskys and Volynskys – on whom the regime had always been able to rely – were mutinying. Sooner or later the mob of protesters in Petrograd would head out to Tsarskoe Selo. The Tsaritsa, however, had other, far more pressing concerns: Alexey, Tatiana and Olga were all seriously ill with measles and were running high temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.63 When she heard the news of the violent insurrectionist turn of events in Petrograd, she told her lady-in-waiting Baroness Buxhoeveden that ‘it was all up’. She had to think of the safety of her children, and sent immediately for the Grand Marshal of the Court, Count Benckendorff, and Colonel Groten, commander of the palace garrison. Her first thought was to head out of the city by train with the sick children to meet Nicholas at Army HQ in Mogilev. But that was sixteen hours away by rail. Count Benckendorff telephoned this suggestion through to the Tsar’s aide-de-camp (ADC), Vladimir Voeikov, who passed it on to Nicholas.64 He was horrified at the idea: ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever’ should his wife do this, he responded. ‘The sick children must not be brought by train … not for anything.’

  At 10 p.m. that same evening Rodzianko telephoned Count Benckendorff, strongly advising Alexandra to take the children somewhere – anywhere – away from Tsarskoe Selo. Tomorrow might be too late. Alexandra baulked at the idea of being seen to run away, but decided she should at least have contingency plans in place and on the morning of the 13th told Baroness Buxhoeveden to ‘quietly pack my bag to be able to start with them [the children] at any moment, should this prove necessary’.65 Shortly afterwards, however, she received devastating news: at 3 p.m. on 15 March, 185 miles away in Pskov, her husband Nicholas had abdicated.

  * * *

  On Monday, 12 March, Nicholas had finally been confronted with the worst: the Duma had lost control of the situation in Petrograd, and troops guarding the city, including even the elite Imperial Guards, were deserting and joining the revolutionaries. Distraught at news of this treachery and anxious about his sick children and his family’s safety, Nicholas sent word that he would return to Tsarskoe immediately. At 5 a.m. the following morning he boarded his train at Stavka, confident that he could restore order in the capital. ‘Thoughts always together. Glorious Weather. Hope are feeling well and quiet. Many troops sent from front. Fondest Love, Nicky,’ he telegraphed.66 All being well, he would arrive back at Tsarskoe Selo by the early morning of the 14th.

  But 100 miles from Petrograd, his train was stopped at Malaya Vishera. The revolutionaries had taken Gatchina and Luga further up the line. He would have to turn back. Arriving at Pskov, HQ of the Northern Army, Nicholas was informed by its commander, General Ruzsky, that the situation in Petrograd was now desperate. After further communication from Prime Minister Rodzianko, Nicholas had to concede: ‘My abdication is necessary.’67 Soon afterwards Alexander Guchkov, Minister of War in the Provisional Government, and Duma deputy Vasily Shulgin arrived at Pskov to ensure that Nicholas did not change his mind and to oversee his signing of the abdication manifesto.* No one, however, had anticipated what happened next: Nicholas declared that he was unable to concede to constitutional government and, in so doing, abandon his divine right to rule as God willed it; he therefore had decided to abdicate not just for himself, but for his son as well. Everyone had been expecting Alexey to take the throne under a regency of Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. Nicholas had made the decision knowing that his haemophiliac son had little chance of surviving beyond his teens, but also because Alexey’s accession would have required him and Alexandra, as former monarchs, to go into exile. Nicholas would not, and could not, countenance being separated from his son. The throne therefore passed to his younger brother Mikhail. Yet Mikhail was only too aware of the poisoned chalice being offered to him and a day later, having taken Rodzianko’s advice, declined. Like his sensible relative, King Haakon, Mikhail declared that he ‘would not accept the throne unless called to it by the voice of the people expressed in a constituent assembly’. Nicholas’s abdication thus left the way clear for the Duma, of which Rodzianko was president, to grasp the status of supreme authority in Russia.68

  It is one of the great ironies of the Nicholas and Alexandra story that the momentous decision to abdicate, when it came, was made by Nicholas in complete isolation from the wife who for the past twenty-three years had done her utmost to oversee his every crucial political decision. Had she been with him, Alexandra would have fought this to her last breath. But to Nicholas, given the breakdown of law and order in the capital and the desperate situation in Russia at large, it seemed the best and only thing he could do – an act of self-sacrifice to stem the tide of revolution. In so doing he hoped it would save the Imperial Army from a crisis created by the division between monarchists and revolutionaries, save the Allied effort from collapse, and save Russia itself from civil war.

  True to his conscience, Nicholas II had acted ‘as God places it in my soul’, thus fulfilling his duty as a devout Russian Orthodox believer. The abdication was like ‘a great unburdening of the spirit’. He was prepared to give up ‘not just his throne, but also his life for Russia’.69 The heartfelt loyalty expressed in the abdication manifesto, in which he insisted that ‘the welfare of Russia must come above all else’, made no impression, however, on Russia’s new men: ‘we laughed at the naïve anachronism of the text,’ recalled Bolshevik Nikolay Sukhanov, ‘the act of abdication was a worthless scrap of paper which might have a literary, but certainly no political, interest for us.’70

  At 1 a.m. the following morning, the 16th, Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, boarded the imperial train for the last time and set out under close escort on his journey into captivity. He was deeply melancholy at the thought of what lay ahead. ‘There is treason, and cowardice, and deceit all around,’ he noted in his diary.71

  But the worst of it was only just beginning. The race to save the Romanovs from themselves had failed; could they now be saved from the revenge of the revolution?

  Chapter 3

  ‘Alicky Is the Cause of It All and Nicky Has Been Weak’

  In his study at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, 13 March 1917, King George V noted in his diary with horror that the inevitable had finally happened: ‘Bad news from Russia, practically a revolution has broken out in Petrograd.’ ‘Some of the Guards regiments have mutinied and killed their officers,’ he went on with alarm, but one thing at least was a mercy: ‘this rising is against the Govt, not against the war’.1 The King’s initial reaction is, in the political scheme of things, a logical one. Nicky had been overthrown, tsarism was at an end and there was nothing more he could do about that. His primary concern, as monarch, had to be the Allied campaign on the Western and Eastern Fronts. At all costs Russia must be kept in the war. Political exigencies came first, even in this, the King’s first comment about his cousin’s fall f
rom power.

  He was, nevertheless, in despair at the collapse of Nicholas’s throne after twenty-three years, especially after all his own and his royal relatives’ attempts to warn them had gone unheeded. He had no doubt at all where the blame lay: ‘I fear Alicky is the cause of it all and Nicky has been weak.’ His wife, Queen Mary, had little to say on the matter, merely noting in her diary that Grand Duchess George (sister of King Constantine of Greece) had come to tea and that they had ‘discussed the surprising events in Russia’.2

  Over in Berlin, Willy the Kaiser was cock-a-hoop. It also happened to be the Silver Jubilee of his cousin Ernie, Grand Duke of Hesse. He could not resist enjoying a degree of Schadenfreude over the abdication, and made a telephone call to inform Ernie that his sister Alexandra had been deposed, adding, without a word of sympathy, ‘happy anniversary’, before he slammed the phone down.3

  * * *

  Historical accounts of the fall of the Romanovs in March 1917 have, till now, revolved around the response of King George V, but in fact documents in AVPRI, the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire – an institution notoriously difficult to access, and which contains the papers of Russian diplomats in Europe for the period prior to the revolution – reveal that other players took an interest from the very first. The earliest messages of support sent to Nicholas in Russia did not in fact come from King George, as has always been assumed, but from one of his less conspicuous and less likely royal cousins: King Alfonso XIII of Spain.

  * * *

  On 14 March the Russian ambassador to Madrid, Prince Ivan Kudashev, received an unexpected visitor.* It was King Alfonso of Spain’s private secretary, the Marquis de Torres de Mendoza, who passed on a message ‘in the name of the warmest feelings of friendship towards the emperor and his deepest sympathies with Russia’, expressing Alfonso’s grave concern for the welfare of the Imperial Family, in light of the recent disturbances in Petrograd. Torres asked Kudashev to confirm the news and send Alfonso’s commiserations to Nicholas. The following day Alfonso sent Torres to the Russian ambassador again, to reiterate his concern over the situation in the capital.4