He was at least half-lying. He had sent the tsar’s telegram to Alexeev, and, receiving it, the general immediately commissioned a manifesto of abdication. But when Ruzskii heard that the Duma men Guchkov and Shulgin were on their way, he kept back Nicholas’s message to Rodzianko. It seems he wanted to hand it to them personally.
While his hangers-on floundered in rearguard action, the tsar himself was engaged in an urgent private conversation. His doctor was telling him plainly that the young haemophiliac Alexei, on whom the burden of the crown was now set to fall, was unlikely to live long.
Ruzskii gave orders for Guchkov and Shulgin to be brought to him without delay. But when at 9 p.m. they finally arrived, carrying a makeshift abdication act that Shulgin had scrawled en route, in one final spasm of court infighting and machination they were taken instead directly to the imperial salon car, without Ruzskii’s knowledge. There commenced a last, bleak, Romanovian comedy.
Guchkov began to hold forth to Nicholas about the threat facing Russia. In tones verging on menace, he told the tsar there was only one course left. As he spoke, Ruzskii entered. He was aghast to see the two newcomers, let alone to realise that they were trying to persuade the silent tsar to do what he had already agreed to do.
Ruzskii interrupted, blurting out this information to the stunned men. As he spoke, Ruzskii handed Nicholas his signed, unsent telegram for Rodzianko – and his stomach pitched to see the tsar fold it up and put it absently away. To do with it who knew what?
‘I deliberated during the morning and was ready to abdicate the throne in favour of my son, in the name of good, peace, and the salvation of Russia,’ the tsar said. Ruzskii’s heart lurched. ‘But now, reconsidering the situation, I have come to the conclusion that because of his illness, I must abdicate at the same time for my son as well as for myself, since I cannot part with him.’
And to the bewilderment of all present, he named his brother Michael as his successor.
Shulgin and Guchkov floundered. Shulgin and Guchkov rallied. ‘Your Majesty,’ Guchkov said, ‘the human feelings of a father have spoken in you, and politics has no place in the matter. Therefore we cannot object to your proposal.’
They must, though, they insisted, have a signed declaration. Embarrassed at the sight of Alexeev’s professional abdication draft, Shulgin withdrew his own scrappy version. The details were finessed: ‘Not wishing to be separated from Our beloved son, We hand Our succession to Our brother, Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich.’ The declaration was backdated by hours, to avoid any implication that Nicholas had acted under pressure from the Duma Committee. As indeed he had. At 11:40 p.m., the tsar signed, and ceased to be tsar.
At 1 a.m. on 3 March, Nicholas Romanov’s train left Pskov for Mogilev.
In a rare glimpse of something like an inner life, the erstwhile autocrat confided to his diary that he was suffering from ‘gloomy feelings’.
Guchkov and Shulgin rushed back to Petrograd, where word of Nicholas’s decision had set off a storm of intrigue among their colleagues. When their train arrived at the capital in the early light, they experienced the anti-monarchist mood first-hand.
The station was full of milling soldiers, eager for information. They surrounded the returnees and pressed them into yet another speech. Shulgin held forth. He read out Nicholas’s abdication impassionedly. But when he concluded, ‘Long Live Emperor Michael III!’ what cheers he provoked were distinctly underwhelming. Just then, in a moment of cruel, broad irony, he was called to the station telephone, where a cautious Milyukov begged him not yet to make public exactly the information he just had.
Guchkov, meanwhile, was also trying to drum up enthusiasm – to a meeting of militant railway workers. When he told them of Michael’s ascension, the reaction was of such violent hostility that one speaker demanded his arrest. It was only with the help of a sympathetic soldier that he escaped.
Shulgin and Guchkov hurtled by car across the city to 12 Millionnaya, the sumptuous apartments of the Grand Duke’s wife Princess Putiatina. There, at 9:15 a.m., Nicholas’s brother met with the exhausted members of the Provisional Government and Duma Committee that had shaped it.
By now, it was only Milyukov – invoking Greater Russia, courage, patriotism – who was still bent on retaining the monarchy. Given the insurrectionary mood in Petrograd, most others were opposed to the Grand Duke’s accession: when Shulgin and Guchkov arrived, their station stories gave the naysayers more weight. If he were crowned, Kerensky told the Grand Duke, ‘I cannot vouch for the life of Your Highness.’
That morning, as at Tsarsko Selo Alexandra in her nurse’s uniform was informed of her husband’s abdication, and, weeping, she prayed that the ‘two snakes’, ‘the Duma and the revolution’, would kill each other, her brother-in-law debated with the first snake over how best to defeat the second.
At about 1 p.m., after hours of discussion and a long moment of solitude, of private soul-searching, Michael returned to his unwelcome guests. He asked Rodzianko and Lvov, another Kadet, whether they could vouch for his safety if he became tsar.
They could not.
‘Under these circumstances,’ he said, ‘I cannot assume the throne.’
Kerensky leapt out of his chair. ‘Your Highness,’ he burst out, ‘you are a noble man!’ The other participants sat numb.
It was lunchtime, and the Romanov dynasty was finished.
That morning, the press, including the new Soviet paper Izvestia, proclaimed the new Provisional Government, constituted on the basis of the eight points agreed between Soviet and Duma Committee. Izvestia called for its support ‘in so far as the emerging government acts in the direction of realising [its] obligations’.
‘In so far as’: in Russian, ‘postol’ku-poskol’ku’. A formulation key to Dual Power, and to its contradictions.
Here, in the smoke of the wretched devil’s sabbath
In the noisy reign of petty demons
They said, ‘There are no fairy tales on earth.’
They said, ‘The fairy tale has died.’
Oh, don’t believe it, don’t believe the funeral march.
A burst of re-enchantment. On 4 March, to the transported delight of vast swathes of the populace, the press made public Nicholas’s abdication and Michael’s refusal of the throne. This was the day that Delo naroda, the SR newspaper, told its readers that they had been lied to, that not only were fairy stories real but that they were living through one.
Once upon a time, it continued, ‘there lived a huge old dragon’, which devoured the best and bravest citizens ‘in the haze of madness and power’. But a valiant hero had appeared, a collective hero. ‘My champion’, wrote Delo naroda, ‘is the people.’
The hour has come for the beast’s end,
The old dragon will coil up and die.