Kirill replied immediately in similar cloud-cuckoo terms: ‘I completely agree,’ he wrote furiously. ‘But despite my entreaty to work together and in conformity with the family, Misha sneaks away and communicates secretly with Rodzyanko,’ he wailed. ‘I have been left completely alone during these days to bear responsibility towards Nicky and to save the situation while recognising the new government.’41
Kirill’s petulant response was understandable: his march into the Tauride Palace had gained him nothing but odium. As for Paul, his manifesto was already dead even as he was advancing its merits. It had been vetoed by the Soviet and as that became clear it ceased to matter, and was put away in a drawer.
Simply too little, too late? Ironically, Nicholas would still think it was too much, too soon. In any case, what the family wanted did not matter to him and it would not be they who would dictate what was to come. As for Alexandra, it had taken just five days, but her hated ministers were now under arrest, her despised government was no more, and her humiliated husband lost in a train. Her downfall, the prospect of which had occupied the minds of so many for so long, was already complete. What she thought and said was no longer of any consequence and never would be again.
AT about seven o’ clock that Wednesday evening, after travelling 860 miles, Nicholas’s train crawled into Pskov station, and he was at last back in contact with the world, albeit one very different to that he had left 38 hours earlier, at 5 a.m. the previous day. There was no one to meet him, though shortly afterwards the 63-year-old army commander, General Nikolai Ruzsky, turned up at the station, ‘bent, grey and old, wearing galoshes,’ his eyes behind his spectacles ‘unfriendly’.42
Sitting in the Tsar’s study aboard the train, Ruzsky was uncomfortable about discussing constitutional issues, but he was convinced of the need for concessions of the kind which Michael had argued for, and he pressed on doggedly to say so. There was a gloomy dinner, then the talks resumed.
Nicholas thought Ruzsky rude and the general would later admit that ‘we had a storm brewing’.43 As stubborn as ever and still blind to his own peril, Nicholas refused to give up his autocratic powers, though he conceded that he was willing to appoint Rodzyanko as prime minister, albeit with a Cabinet responsible to the Tsar.
Ruzsky was getting nowhere, until a telegram arrived from General Alekseev at Mogilev, urging the same concessions. Nicholas, now in an uncomfortable corner, sought compromise. He insisted that, whatever else, the ministers for war, navy and foreign affairs should continue to be accountable to him. Ruzsky would not even concede that: all ministers, he argued, should be accountable to the Duma.
Nicholas went to his sleeping car a rattled man. In refusing the demands of politicians and dismissing the pleas of his brother and others, he had assumed the absolute loyalty of his senior military commanders. Now they, too, seemed to be against him. At 2 a.m. he called Ruzsky to his carriage and told him that he had ‘decided to compromise’; a manifesto granting a responsible minister, already signed, was on the table.44 Ruzsky was authorised to notify Rodzyanko that he could now be prime minister of a parliamentary government.
However, that proved only how little the Tsar knew of what had happened in the capital since Michael had wired him at 10.30 p.m. on Monday night, a little more 48 hours earlier. When, at 3.30 a.m. Ruzsky got through to Petrograd on the direct line, Rodzyanko’s reply was shatteringly frank: ‘It is obvious that neither His Majesty nor you realise what is going on here… Unfortunately the manifesto has come too late… and there is no return to the past… everywhere troops are siding with the Duma and the people, and the threatening demands for an abdication in favour of the son, with Michael Aleksandrovich as Regent, are becoming quite definite.’45
When Ruzsky finished his long and painfully slow discussion on the direct wire, the time was 7.30 a.m. on Thursday March 2. Before the day was out, Nicholas would abdicate not once, but twice.
12. POISONING THE CHALICE
HIS discussion on the wire with Rodzyanko was the first time that Ruzsky knew that the crisis in Petrograd had moved beyond demands for a constitutional monarchy to that of the abdication of Nicholas. He therefore sent on Rodzyanko’s taped message to Alekseev at Supreme Headquarters and at 9 a.m. that Thursday morning Alekseev cabled his reply: ‘my deep conviction that there is no choice and that the abdication should now take place…it is very painful for me to say so, but there is no other solution.’1
Having made his own views clear, at least to Ruzsky, Alekseev — less pained than he pretended — did not wait for a reply but sent out his own telegrams to his other army commanders and to the admirals commanding the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. Russia had a war to fight and Alekseev was determined that the revolution in Petrograd should not undermine the frontline armies waiting to begin their spring offensive. He summarised the discussions between Ruzsky and Rodzyanko, putting the case in black and white and more bluntly than the Duma president had done himself. ‘The dynastic question has been put point-blank’, he told his commanders. ‘The war may be continued until its victorious end only provided the demands regarding the abdication from the throne in favour of the son and under the regency of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich are satisfied. Apparently the situation does not permit another solution…’2
His cables went out at 10.15 am. Four hours later, at 2.15 p.m., he wired the Emperor at Pskov giving him the first three replies. They would prove decisive.
Nicholas had been given a transcript of the early-morning tapes when he arose in the late morning, and he also read the cable from Alekseev recommending abdication. There was ‘a terrible moment of silence,’ Ruzsky remembered, as Nicholas absorbed the shock,3 but he gave no sign of his inner turmoil when he went for a walk along the station platform with Ruzsky at lunch-time. A few hours earlier he had assumed that in conceding a responsible ministry he had given more than enough; now he was being asked to contemplate the unthinkable: that he should give up the throne. Later it would be said by those who deplored his abdication that Ruzsky bullied him into it, shouting at him and thumping the table with his fist, saying ‘Will you make up your mind to go!’4
No, he was not bullied and Ruzsky had no reason to do so knowing that the decision depended on the replies awaited from the commanders. There was no comfort for Nicholas there in the cable from Alekseev, which incorporated the first three responses.
The reply from Grand Duke Nicholas — ‘Uncle Nikolasha’, the former Supreme Commander sacked in 1915, and now commander on the Caucasus front could not be more frank:
As a loyal subject I feel it my necessary duty of allegiance in the spirit of my oath, to beg Your Imperial Majesty on my knees to save Russia and your heir, being aware of your sacred feelings of love for Russia and for him. Make the Sign of the Cross and hand over to him your heritage. There is no other way…
The second was from Brusilov, Michael’s former commander-in-chief, and the most successful fighting general in the army:
At the present time the only solution… is the abdication in favour of the heir Tsarevich under the Regency of Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich. There is no other way out; speed is necessary, so that the popular conflagration, which has grown to large proportions, can be rapidly extinguished otherwise it will result in incalculable catastrophic consequences. By these acts the dynasty itself would be saved in the person of the lawful heir.