Free The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II by Donald Crawford

in his Corps to suggest that morale was low, or that the ferment in the capital had affected his troops. As before, when he had left the Savage Division ten months earlier, they cheered him, played trumpet farewells, sang songs, gave him tea and looked sorry to see him go, he noted in his diary. 14 What he also noted was that he had been spared making a speech, as he did when departing the Savage Division. Doing so, he lamented, ‘must have taken at least three years of my life. I am always so frightfully nervous, but I pulled myself together and spoke loudly, slowly, and clearly.’
     
    Yet politics could not be kept at bay. Before returning to Gatchina he went to say goodbye to his commander-in-chief Brusilov at his headquarters in Kamenets-Podolsky, arriving there on Wednesday, February 1.
     
    ‘I was very fond of him’. Brusilov recalled, ‘for he was an absolutely honourable and upright man, taking no sides and lending himself to no intrigues…he shunned every kind of gossip, whether connected with the services or with family matters. As a soldier he was an excellent leader and an unassuming and conscientious worker.’ 15
     
    As the two men said farewell on February 1, Brusilov thought the situation too serious for just polite talk. ‘I expounded most earnestly…the need for immediate and drastic reforms…begging him to explain all this to the Tsar and to lend my views his personal support.’ Michael promised to do so, but cautioned that ‘my brother has time and time again had warnings and entreaties of this kind from every quarter, but he is the slave of influence and pressure that no one is in a position to overcome.’ 16 He meant the Empress.
     
    The two men shook hands, and Michael set off home next day. It was a slow journey. ‘We are moving with a delay of 3 hours, probably because of snowdrifts. I say “probably”, as you can never know the real cause of happenings. But the truth is that everything is in complete disorder everywhere.’ 17
     
    It was going to get worse.
     
    THE serious plotters were now well advanced in their plans for a palace coup. Discounting the near-hysterical ‘champagne plot’ at the Vladimir palace, which served only to extinguish any hopes that the Romanovs could put their own house in order, there were a number of conspiracies, none knowing much if anything of the others. All necessarily were shadowy and perhaps only two were credible.
     
    The Progressive Bloc of conservatives and liberals in the Duma had prepared a list of ministers who would form the government after a coup, with Michael as Regent, though they were vague as to how this was to be accomplished.
     
    Demands that something should be done could be heard on all sides. Vladimir Stankevich, a henchman of the radical left-wing Duma deputy Aleksandr Kerensky, saw ‘a general determination to have done with the outrages perpetrated by court circles and to overthrow Nicholas. Several names were suggested as candidates for the throne, but there was unanimous agreement that Michael Aleksandrovich was the only one who could guarantee the constitutional legitimacy of government.’ 18
     
    But talk was not action. Among those determined to act were Aleksandr Guchkov, the 55-year-old leader of the Octobrists, a right-wing party in the Duma, but one which favoured ‘constitutional government’; among his supporters were the liberal Nikolai Nekrasov, and industrialist Mikhail Tereshchenko, all destined to play a leading part in the events to come. Nekrasov and Tereshchenko were young men, the former 36 and the other only 29.
     
    Guchkov, a former President of the Duma, had been hated by the Empress since 1912 when he had bitterly denounced Rasputin — ‘Oh, could not one hang Guchkov?” was her response. 19 The gossipy French ambassador Paléologue called him ‘the personal enemy of Their Majesties’, 20 so it was no surprise that he should now want to be rid of them.
     
    Guchkov’s reasoning was that