In London, Dimitri’s sister Marie was reduced to knitting sweaters for a living. When in desperation she wrote to Queen Mary for help, she received in reply a letter which did not contain the hoped-for cheque, but merely a list of people the Queen suggested might buy her sweaters.
Dimitri gave up on London as too expensive and went to Paris where he ended up in the arms of Coco Chanel, the famed perfumier. She kept him in style in the Ritz, though by chance he amply repaid her: testing out six new perfumes, she asked him to tell her which he liked most; he sniffed all six then pronounced the fifth to be the best. Chanel No 5 would prove to be one of the most successful brands of all time. Fortunately for Dimitri, he went on in 1924 to marry an American heiress, Audrey Emery of Cincinnati; their son — born in London and thereafter known as Paul Ilyinski, would become a US marine, and end up as Republican mayor of Palm Beach, Florida.
Otherwise, the reality for those who had lost everything was that empty titles were matched by empty pockets. It also concentrated minds. Natasha’s financial problems would go on, but inevitably there came a time when she had to face the fact that Michael was dead. Coming to terms with that was also a practical necessity: Michael’s assets had to be recovered and his affairs sorted out while they still could be. To achieve that he had to be declared dead by a court, and six years after he had disappeared without trace, that was what happened. On July 5, 1924, the High Court in London granted her letters of administration of the English estates of the late Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich of Russia who ‘died on or since the 12 day of June 1918, at a place unknown, intestate’.8 The value of Michael’s assets in England were given as only £95, but it was the order not the money which mattered.
Michael was legally dead. And nowhere was the news received more gladly than in a little fishing village across the Channel. For here at last was the opportunity Grand Duke Kirill had so long been waiting for, to take what he had not dared to take before. He would now become the next Emperor.
IN June 1917 Kirill had been given permission by Kerensky to go to Finland; he remained there with his family until 1920, when they all left for Germany. Later he and his German-born wife Ducky and their three children made their home in St Briac, on the Brittany coast. It was here on August 8, one month after the London High Court order, that Kirill tested the waters by issuing his first manifesto, declaring himself ‘Guardian of the Throne’9 — a title which confused everyone but which emboldened him a month later to issue a second manifesto in which he proclaimed himself ‘Emperor of All the Russias’, and thus as successor to the now legally-dead Michael.10
In this manifesto he stated that ‘the Russian laws of succession…do not permit the Imperial Throne to remain vacant after the death of the previous Emperor and His nearest Heir have been established’.11
This was its own confirmation of the fact that he accepted that Michael had been Emperor; that he had not abdicated as had been claimed in March 1917, and that indeed he was still Emperor until pronounced dead in London in July. If ‘the throne is never vacant’, then the only person who had been filling it until then was Michael. Nicholas and Alexis were known to have been killed in 1918, so ‘the previous Emperor and nearest Heir’ did not refer to them. Accordingly Kirill, calling himself ‘the senior member of the Tsarist House, and sole legal heir’, was declaring himself Michael’s successor in obedience to the Fundamental Laws governing the imperial house.12
No one was likely to say so, or even consider it, but the strategy of the Bolsheviks in denying the monarchists a ‘live banner’ by pretending that Michael was alive, not dead, now appeared to be vindicated six years later. That apart, the manifesto split the Romanov family, as it still divides them today.
Of the sixteen Grand Dukes who had been alive at the start of the war, only six lived long enough to get out of Russia. Of these, three — Kirill’s two brothers, Boris and Andrew unsurprisingly recognised him as Tsar, as did Michael’s brother-in-law Sandro. The three others — the 68-year-old former army supreme commander Nikolasha, his younger brother Peter, and Dimitri, did not. It also divided the huge numbers of monarchists then living in exile, in France, Britain, Germany, the Balkans and the United States, after the Red Army finally crushed the Whites in 1922 to become masters of all Russia.
The Dowager Empress was scathing in her condemnation. She protested to Nikolasha from her home in Denmark:
I was most terribly pained when I read Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich’s manifesto proclaiming himself EMPEROR OF ALL THE RUSSIAS. To date there has been no precise information concerning the fate of My beloved Sons or My Grandson and, for this reason, I consider the proclamation of a new EMPEROR to be premature. There is still no one who could ever extinguish in me the last ray of hope.
I fear that this manifesto will create division. This will not improve the situation but, quite the opposite, will worsen it, while Russia is tormented enough without such a thing.
If it has pleased THE LORD GOD, as he acts in HIS mysterious ways, to summon My beloved sons and grandson to HIMSELF, then, without wishing to look ahead, and with firm hope in the mercy of GOD, I believe that HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR will be elected in accordance with Our Basic Laws by the Orthodox Church in concert with the Russian People… I am sure that, as the senior member of the HOUSE OF THE ROMANOVS, You are of the same opinion as Myself.
Kirill had expected bitter opposition. He told Michael’s sister Xenia that ‘I know full well that I can expect no mercy from all the malicious attacks and accusations of vanity’.14 The attacks on him were, however, founded on more than malice and charges of self-aggrandisement. The greatest practical objection to Kirill’s action was that the ‘White Russians’ were united only in their opposition to the Bolsheviks and in their belief that their enemy would not rule for long, and come that day they would all return home.
Even among those who favoured a return to the crown, many wanted that to be a decision settled by a constituent assembly — in short, on the same terms as those set out in Michael’s manifesto of March 1917. A constitutional monarchy might follow the downfall of the Bolshevik regime, and monarchists naturally hoped that it would, but the critical need was to overthrow the Bolsheviks, not divide the opposition.
Nikolasha, still widely respected as the former Supreme Commander, gave voice to that view when he issued his own manifesto in the wake of Kirill’s. The aim, he said, was to re-establish the rule of law in Russia without stipulating the form of government15 — in effect, another restatement of Michael’s manifesto. Kirill had jumped the gun. In any case, why Kirill as Emperor? The so-called Supreme Monarchist Council, which claimed to represent majority monarchist opinion, favoured Dimitri16 — and as it happened, so did the British government. Clinging to the small print of imperial laws, the high-minded Council held that Kirill — and his two younger brothers — were excluded from the succession because their German-born mother had not converted to Orthodoxy at the time of her marriage, as required by law.17 It did not help that Kirill had married not only a divorcée but, contrary to the law of the Russian Orthodox Church, his first cousin.