He was wrong. The deputies refused to disperse, adjourned to another chamber, and set up a 'temporary committee' that then claimed to be the de facto government. That said, it had no idea of what might happen next, and nor did its leader, Duma president Rodzyanko. 'What shall I do? What shall I do?' Rodzyanko cried out in vain hope of any answer.
So Rodzyanko turned to the only man he thought could rescue them. He slipped out of the chamber and telephoned Grand Duke Michael at his home in Gatchina, twenty-nine miles south, urging him to come to the capital immediately.
Michael did just that. His special train left at 5 p.m. and an hour later in Petrograd he was whisked away to the Marie Palace on St Isaac's Square to join an emergency conference attended by the prime minister, Golitsin, and his chief ministers, together with Rodzyanko and other leading members of the Duma's new 'temporary committee'.
In the government there was only resigned defeatism. That evening the hated interior minister Protopopov had been persuaded to resign and as he shuffled off into the night he muttered that there was nothing now left to him 'but to shoot myself'. No one cared what he did and no one bothered to say goodbye to the man so trusted by the empress, so despised by the nation.
Yet his departure was also its own signal that the government was no more. Golitsin accepted that his ministry was finished, but admitted that he did not know how to write out the death certificate. He hoped that Grand Duke Michael would do that for him.
As the conference agreed, with Golitsin having thrown in the towel, the only hope now was that Michael would take over control in the capital, and rally loyal troops to his side, including the relief force the tsar had promised Rodzyanko. He was a famous general, and the army would do as he demanded. He would also need to form a new government, which in turn meant the tsar formally appointing his brother as regent in the capital.
Rodzyanko confidently expected that he would be the obvious new 'strong man' premier and was visibly dismayed when instead Michael proposed Prince Georgy Lvov - the preferred choice of the leading Duma men and its own evidence that Michael knew more about what was going on among the key political leaders than the surprised Rodzyanko.
Lvov was not a member of the Duma, but as long-time head of the powerful union of local authorities, the zemstvos, he was the best- known civic leader in the country and more popular and more trusted among the radical elements than the authoritarian bull-voiced Rodzy- anko. The majority Progressive Bloc in the Duma had already opted for Lvov, and now, named by Michael, it was Lvov who was endorsed at the two-hour conference.
In the event they were all wasting their time. Leaving the Marie Palace for the War Ministry across the square, Michael began his despatch to his brother on the Hughes apparatus, a primitive form of telex. He set out succinctly what had been agreed at the conference, and that the situation had become so serious that every hour counted. The reply came forty minutes later, passed on through chief of staff General Alexeev. Almost dismissive, it ignored Michael's proposals, but said that the tsar would return next day to Tsarskoe Selo and also send four infantry and four calvary regiments to restore order. Then, at 11.35 p.m., snubbing Michael, Nicholas telegraphed Golitsin to say that 'I personally bestow upon you all the necessary powers for civil rule.'
But by then it was too late. Golitsin and his ministers had drifted away into the night and there was no prime minister and no civil rule. Later, Michael would sum up the story of those futile hours with one word in his diary: Alas.
At 5 a.m. in the pre-dawn of Tuesday, February 28, the train carrying the tsar back to Tsarskoe Selo left Mogilev, its windows darkened, its passengers asleep. The start time had moved forward because it had been decided to take a roundabout route back, so as to leave the direct line to Petrograd clear for the relief force that had been ordered. The change would mean that he would arrive home at around 8 a.m. the following morning, Wednesday.
'Every hour is precious,' Michael had told his brother on his wire on Monday night, urging him not to leave Mogilev at all so that he could be in direct communication throughout the crisis. On his train, Nicholas would be virtually incommunicado. Russia no longer had a government and over the next crucial twenty-seven hours or more it would, for all practical purposes, be without an emperor. Nevertheless, when he reached Tsarskoe Selo the next morning the tsar expected to hear that General Nikolai Ivanov and his 6,000 front-line troops were in place to crush the rebellion. He could sleep easily. His train was on schedule and at 4 a.m. the next morning he was less than 100 miles from Tsarskoe Selo, having covered 540 miles since leaving Mogilev.
It was then that the train abruptly stopped, at the town of Malaya Vishera, with the alarming news that revolutionaries had blocked the line ahead. Since the train had only a few guards aboard, fighting their way forward was out of the question. There was only one choice for them: to go back to Bologoe, halfway between Petrograd and Moscow, and then head west for Pskov, headquarters of General Nikolai Ruzsky's Northern Army. It was the nearest safe haven, though it would still leave Nicholas 170 miles from home and worse off than if he had stayed in Mogilev where he could command the whole of his armies. His journey had been entirely wasted.
'To Pskov, then,' he said curtly and retired back to his sleeping car. But once there he put his real feelings into his diary. 'Shame and dishonour', he wrote despairingly. The journey to Pskov meant that for the next, and decisive, fifteen hours - until about 7 p.m. that Wednesday evening - the Emperor ofAll the Russias would once again vanish into the empty snow-covered countryside, a second day lost.
In consequence, with no government and a nomadic tsar lost in a train, power in Petrograd passed on Tuesday 28 February to the revolution, with the Tauride Palace home of a Duma that was no more. Instead, it now housed a noisy mass of workers, soldiers and students, joined together in a new organisation, a Soviet on the lines of the 1905 revolution. The few hundred respectable deputies who backed the Temporary Committee of the Duma now jostled for places in rooms and hallways packed with excited street orators, mutineers and strike leaders. It was chaos and would remain so for days to come.
In that crush, the young man beginning to stand out as the dominant figure was Alexander Kerensky, a member of the Temporary Duma Committee but also vice-chairman of the new 'Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies'. Bestriding both camps, his power was enormous, with the Duma deputies recognising him as their only bridge to the new Soviet, the master if it chose to be. The Temporary Committee of the Duma had the better claim to government, but its members knew that in this revolution they could only lead where Ker- ensky was willing to follow.
At the same time, the Soviet had the sense to know that they were in no position to form 'a people's government' - their authority did not extend beyond the capital, and they had few if any among them with the experience to act as ministers. There had to be a deal, and for the Duma men that meant securing the tsar's abdication while preserving the monarchist system itself, by the same means earlier intended by the plotters in their ranks: Nicholas would be replaced by his lawful successor, his son Alexis, with Grand Duke Michael as regent.
But Nicholas had first to be compelled to give up the throne - and trundling around Russia in his train, he had, as yet, no idea that that was what was being demanded of him.
As the tsar had hoped, his train did eventually reach Pskov at around 7 p.m. that Wednesday evening, after travelling 860 miles in total but still almost 200 miles from his intended destination of Tsarskoe Selo. However, at least he was back in contact with the world, albeit one very different to that he had left thirty-eight hours earlier.