Free The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II by Donald Crawford Page B

The end for Nicholas would be very different to the one which they had designed. Yes, he would sign his abdication as a result, and in a train as it turned out, but Michael would not be Regent, he would be Tsar.
     

10. ‘MAKE YOURSELF REGENT’
     
    BACK home in Gatchina on Saturday, February 4, Michael telephoned his brother-in-law Sandro in Petrograd. Had there been any sign that Nicholas was ready to make concessions— anything hopeful at all — while he had been away at the front? The answer was depressingly No. Michael arranged to meet Sandro in the capital, and then proposed that the two of them should go together to Tsarskoe Selo in yet another desperate attempt to persuade him to see sense, appoint a responsible government, and take his wife out of politics altogether. 1 Sandro agreed, but suggested that he first went there and confronted Alexandra privately. What had to be said to her in front of Nicholas would come better from him alone than with Michael. At least his wife Xenia, as the Tsar’s sister, could not be accused of being in ‘a bad set’.
     
    Arriving in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexandra reluctantly agreed to meet Sandro. Nicholas led him into her mauve bedroom. ‘Alix lay in bed, dressed in a white negligée embroidered with lace...I kissed her hand and her lips just skimmed my cheek, the coldest greeting given me by her since the first day we met in 1893. I took a chair and moved it close to her bed, facing a wall covered with innumerable icons lit by two blue-and-pink church lamps.’
     
    With Nicholas standing silently, puffing away on his cigarettes, Sandro told her bluntly that she had to remove herself from politics. Their exchange became heated, until all pretence at politeness vanished. ‘Remember Alix, I remained silent for thirty months!’ he shouted at her in a wild rage. ‘For thirty months I never said as much as a word to you about the disgraceful goings-on in our government — better to say in your government! I realise that you are willing to perish and that your husband feels the same way, but what about us? Must we all suffer for your blind stubbornness? No, Alix, you have no right to drag your relatives with you into a precipice. You are incredibly selfish!’
     
    Alexandra stared at him coldly. ‘I refuse to continue this dispute’, she replied tersely. ‘You are exaggerating the danger. Some day, when you are less excited, you will admit that I knew better.’
     
    He got up, kissed her, received no kiss in reply, and strode out in anger. He would never see Alexandra again.
     
    Passing through the mauve salon he went straight to the library, ordered a pen and paper and sat down to write a report on his meeting for Michael. As he did so, he looked up and saw the Tsar’s ADC watching him, as if on guard. The aide refused to leave, and ‘in a fury’ Sandro stood up and stormed out of the palace. 2
     
    The next day he returned with Michael. Meeting them in his study, Nicholas smoked, listened impassively, but seemed deaf to anything that Michael said as he tried in vain to impress upon his brother that without change he faced disaster. Sandro judged that they were ‘wasting his time and ours’ and when it came his turn to support Michael’s arguments he found by the end that ‘I was hardly able to speak...emotion choking me’. 3
     
    With that, Sandro gave up in despair. However, Michael told him he would try yet again, hopeless though it seemed, and on Friday February 10 — six days after coming back from the front — he drove once more to Tsarskoe Selo. 4 The meeting in Nicholas’s study was as pointless as the earlier one, though it was interrupted by the arrival of Rodzyanko. Nicholas agreed to see him, and went out into the audience chamber.
     
    Rodzyanko was standing with a report from the Duma which simply underlined the points which Michael and Sandro had been making, but ‘the Emperor listened not only with indifference but with a kind of ill-will’,