Britain’s Betrayal of the Tsar
The last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917), had abdicated in March 1917, and been placed under house arrest by the Provisional Government. On 7 November 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power and in July 1918 the Communist regime gave the order to murder the ex-Tsar, his wife Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, and their children. A great “what-if” about this tragedy is the offer of asylum extended by the British government to the Emperor less than a week after his fall. There has been a historical debate ever since about whether the British offer was ever revoked; if it was, then by whom, with a particular focus on the role of King George V (r. 1910-36), a cousin of the Tsar’s who—as can be seen—bore an uncanny resemblance to Nicholas; and if the offer was ever feasible in the Russian context of the time.
BACKGROUND
Nicholas II is often regarded as both cruelly tyrannical and incompetent. There are structural reasons why this reputation sticks, above all the fact that he fell, leading—rightly—to the conclusion that he must have done something wrong. With modern sensibilities about political legitimacy, where liberalism and democracy are the only accepted standards, a forthright autocrat, who believes the powers of his office are mandated by God,1 can get no hearing and indeed often provokes disgust on these grounds alone. It should be noted that, despite the Tsar’s beliefs, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the Emperor’s powers were seriously tempered by constitutional mechanisms.2 Regardless, this is an issue of ideology on which there can be no reconciliation. Nicholas’ competence is a bit more open to dispassionate inquiry.
The Russian terrorist-revolutionary movement had taken shape in the 1860s, crafted by the intelligentsia, fed on nihilism and a distinctly Russian messianism that was later mixed with Marxism. The terrorist movement had little support among the toiling masses it claimed to represent: the terrorists’ greatest pre-1917 “success” was the murder of Alexander II (r. 1855-81) in 1881, and yet the workers regarded the men who had cut down the Liberator-Tsar (not entirely wrongly) as landed nobles furious that the Emperor had freed the serfs and improved the lot of the peasantry. Despite low levels of popular support, the unique combination—absent in Western Europe, where there was a contemporaneous terrorism problem—of a general sympathy for the terrorists among the intelligentsia and Russia’s social structures meant a small number of terrorists could create havoc in the whole state machinery.3 This was a terrible problem inherited by Nicholas II and, contrary to the view that at every point he made the worst possible decision, he—eventually—handled it reasonably well.
After a steady escalation of activity in the decade since Nicholas II took office in 1894, the terrorists unleashed a tidal wave of violence on Russia in 1905.4 Nicholas initially responded by eschewing repressive measures—because of his nature, and political concerns, foreign and domestic5—and instead made reasonable concessions, proclaiming the October Manifesto that created a constitutional system and opened a Duma (Parliament), in the hopes this would isolate the extremists. It did no such thing; to the contrary. The masses recoiled from God’s own Emperor surrendering the prerogatives of autocracy to gangs of hooligans and murderers, and the liberals who should have appreciated constitutional concessions lined up—as ever—with the terrorists, out of both a romantic idealism and a cynical belief that it was the terrorists’ actions that brought them these concessions and could bring them more.6 The terrorists, not unreasonably, sensed weakness and opportunity, leading to a terrible spike in violence that temporarily overwhelmed the government’s capacity.7 A ferocious crackdown beginning in the summer of 1906, led by the newly-installed Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin and mostly carried out by the Army, rather than the Okhranka, the political police, had executed a thousand terrorists in field courts by April 1907.8 The revolutionaries would later attribute their failure in to the 1906-07 repressive measures,9 and it is certainly true that once it was clear that terrorism would bring no further concessions, it demoralised the extremists. But the terrorists’ own methods induced exhaustion in the population, and by the end of 1907 this fatigue had combined with Stolypin’s reforms to largely stabilise the situation.10
Nicholas is not considered to have been a good war leader. In 1904, Russia’s Far East policy ran into Meiji Japan; the ensuing conflict was a disaster in itself and provided the pretext for the radicals to launch their revolution. And it is certainly true that without the Great War it is difficult to imagine Nicholas’ demise. Whatever blame can be given to the Tsar over the Japanese war, however, Nicholas had not started the First World War and right to the last did everything he could to avoid it. It was the Kaiser’s Germany that ensured no other solution was possible to the Sarajevo assassination.11 The Russian political forces chomping at the bit for war in 1914 were the elected deputies in the Duma, not the Emperor.12
In terms of the conduct of the war, it is often argued that Nicholas dismissing his cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolayevich, and taking personal charge of the Imperial Army as commander-in-chief in early September 1915, was the end of things.13 The decision did mean that the Tsar was unable to avoid paying the direct political price for everything that went wrong. Still, the fact is Nicholas took over amid the complete catastrophe of the “Great Retreat”, in which Russia had been forced back 300 miles in places along the front and lost control of Poland and parts of the Baltics, while a year later the combined weight of the Russian “Brusilov offensive” and the British-French offensive on the Somme nearly broke the Germans.14
Morale in the Russian military was high at the end of 1916 and even after Nicholas fell in the “February Revolution” in 1917 morale remained reasonably high—until the liberals in the Provisional Government destroyed it, first with their senseless behaviour after the first Bolshevik coup attempt in July 1917, and then a paranoid attempt to go after the Army brass, the debacle remembered to history as the “Kornilov affair”.15 At every stage where Russian liberals could have made common cause with constitutional conservative elements, they proved to have a fatal attraction to the radicals, who found the liberals a useful stepping stone to roll over the Imperial government and jettisoned them thereafter.16
The most obvious mistake that Nicholas made was, paradoxically, because of his belief in the divinity of his office: since God was the ultimate arbiter of Russia’s affairs, he did not take his father’s hands-on approach to keeping the Court and its schemers in check, and did not firmly manage the giant bureaucracy to ensure that orders given at the centre translated into policy on the ground.17 The most egregious example is the infamous “starets”, Grigory Rasputin, who had been allowed to accrue power after Nicholas went to the front in late 1915 over the personnel-appointments process itself and to place inadequates in positions where the Empire could not afford bunglers when the crunch moment came. The political damage done to the Throne by its association with Rasputin’s unsavoury conduct was secondary to this practical fact. Rasputin’s murder in December 1916 came too late.18
THE BRITISH PROPOSAL
The mutiny of the Petrograd garrison on 12 March 1917 and the response of the Russian political and military elite had led to the Tsar’s abdication on 15 March.
Britain’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a Liberal, sent a telegram that was made public on 23 March expressing “most profound satisfaction” at the advent of the Russian Provisional Government, noting in passing Britain’s appreciation for the loyalty of the now-fallen Emperor, before calling the revolution “the greatest service [the Russian people] have yet made to the cause for which the Allied peoples have been fighting … It reveals the fundamental truth that this war is at bottom a struggle for popular government as well as for liberty, which is the only sure safeguard of peace”. Lloyd George concluded by saying this was a harbinger that “the Prussian military autocracy which began the war, and which is still the only barrier to peace, will itself, before long, be overthrown”.19 The U.S. recognised the Provisional Government three days later.
The backdrop for this was the January 1917 declaration of the Allies’ “democratic” war aims: this was partly to counter and co-opt President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic “peace without victory” speech and partly to assist in the political side of “remobilisation” as the total war economy came online after morale had, for the one and only time in the Great War, dipped in Western countries. But this was not mere cynicism: Lloyd George, a more activist figure than Herbert Asquith, whom he had replaced in early December 1916, believed firmly—as did the French—that breaking the back of Prussian militarism and refashioning Germany on democratic lines would secure the peace of Europe.20 Having autocratic Russia within the Allied camp was thus an embarrassing anomaly. The elites in Allied countries squared the circle by hoping for a democratic evolution in Russia after the defeat of the immediate menace of Germany.21 With the “February Revolution”, the timetable seemed to have been moved up, and it removed the awkwardness for Wilson when the Germans forced America overtly into the war in April 1917: it could now be cast as an uncomplicated contest of “democracies against despots”.22
Britain’s King George V was unhappy with Lloyd George’s telegram, seeing it as populist demagogy aimed at a domestic audience and hardly an appropriate sentiment from a monarchical government. Lloyd George replied by reminding the King his dynasty was founded on the “Glorious Revolution” that had put a King to flight.23
The King had tried to transmit his own telegram to the deposed Tsar, composed on 19 March, saying was “deeply distressed” at the turn of events, adding, “My thoughts are constantly with you and I shall always remain your true and devoted friend”. The British ambassador in Petersburg/Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, tried to deliver this note through the Russian Foreign Secretary Pavel Milyukov, a liberal monarchist who had been swept up in the insurrectionist furies to the point of recommending the Tsar abdicate. Milyukov’s fallback position of trying to be the steadying hand to guide the interim authorities in a moderate direction was over within a month, after the Germans sent Vladimir Lenin into Petrograd and a Bolshevik active measure brought him down. The system of “dyarchy” birthed by the revolution in practice meant the supremacy of the Petrograd Soviet, as would become ever-more apparent during the eight-month life of the Provisional Government. Buchanan now ran into this fact when Milyukov told him at their meeting on 21 March that the King’s telegram would make things worse. The Provisional Government had been nervous enough about receiving approval from Lloyd George; its officials could not be seen associating with the Tsar.
It was at the 21 March meeting Milyukov first broached the idea of the Tsar going into exile in Britain. Later in the day, Buchanan issued a public warning against “any violence done to the Emperor or his family” after the Tsar was placed under house arrest in Tsarskoye Selo, and cabled London with Milyukov’s proposal and his own recommendation that it be carried out. Lloyd George was not happy about it but was convinced it could not be refused. The Provisional Government’s claim to have placed the Imperial Family under house arrest for their own protection was not entirely false: there was a clear desire for Revolutionary bloodshed among some of the soldiers surrounding the Emperor, incited by the radicals in the Soviet, which had already begun destroying discipline in the Russian Army. Lord Stamfordham (Arthur Bigge), the King’s Private Secretary, had asked that Buchanan “hint” to the Provisional Government that it should provide the funds for the Tsar’s travel and living expenses once in Britain. Milyukov was receptive to this idea, with the proviso that it not become public the initiative for Nicholas’ removal from Russia had come from the Provisional Government.24
A significant marker was put down two days later, on 23 March 1917: upon getting word of the plan for the Imperial Family to leave Russia, the Petrograd Soviet, specifically its Executive Committee (Ispolkom), reversed the suggestion it had made on the day of the Tsar’s deposition for him to be sent into exile, now protesting loudly, and mobilising workers and soldiers to occupy railway stations through which the ex-Tsar might travel.25
Still, at this stage it seemed likely to plan would proceed. The Tsar was aware of the British proposal and was preparing to leave. “I looked through my books and things, and started to put aside everything that I wanted to take with me, if we have to go to England”, Nicholas wrote in his diary on 23 March.26 The Tsar had never had any relish for power, finding it a heavy burden and finding the ceremonial aspects a “tedious imposition”, but he believed that in abdicating he had betrayed the oath to his Lord and his country; the office had been surrendered because he had been convinced this was the best way to allow his country to resist foreign conquest.27 Despite the immense trauma of the experience, Nicholas bore it with complete dignity: he had been raised by a father who insisted on “regal majesty” even when he was dying,28 and now in his own travails Nicholas never betrayed any emotion, no matter the provocations from jeering soldiers or taunting radicals-turned-ministers; never complained of the unfairness of what had befallen him; and engaged in no efforts to overturn the Revolution.
The Tsar received his first official visit on 3 April 1917 from then-Justice Minister of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, the Prime Minister after July 1917. Kerensky had deliberately arrived in an ostentatious manner in a motorcade of cars confiscated from the Imperial Garage and greeted Nicholas with a harangue about the abolition of the death penalty. Evidently looking for a rise out of the fallen Tsar, the assumptions of Kerensky life were upended. Nicholas was a “disarmingly charming person” and “far from stupid, despite what we thought of him”, Kerensky wrote later in his memoir. The Tsar asked about plans for his exile, and Kerensky told him these were being arranged. Kerensky, though, could not get over the Tsar’s manner: so composed so soon after his world had been destroyed. “He did not wish to fight for power”, Kerensky wrote: retirement into civilian life had “brought him nothing but relief”. Freed from his desk and “those everlasting documents”, Nicholas was truly content to read, walk, and spend time with his children. It was the Tsarina who felt the loss of her authority. By the end of the meeting, Kerensky, who had arrived determined to refer to the deposed Emperor as “Nikolai Alexandrovich” to underscore his diminished status, found himself addressing Nicholas as “Your Royal Highness”.29 Buchanan independently came to remarkably similar conclusions.30
BRITAIN RECONSIDERS
The first sign that Britain was getting cold feet came on 30 March, when Stamfordham sent a note to British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour:31
The King has been thinking much about the Government’s proposal that the Emperor Nicholas and his family should come to England. As you are doubtless aware, the King has a strong personal friendship for the Emperor and therefore would be glad to do anything to help him in this crisis. But His Majesty cannot help doubting not only on account of the dangers of the voyage, but on the general grounds of expediency, whether it is advisable that the Imperial Family should take up their residence in this country. The King would be glad if you would consult the Prime Minister, as His Majesty understands that no definite decision has yet been come to on the subject by the Russian Government.
Balfour replied emphatically to Stamfordham on 2 April that the offer was made and must be upheld:
His Majesty’s Ministers quite realise the difficulties to which you refer in your letter, but they do not think, unless the position changes, that it is now possible to withdraw the invitation which has been sent, and they therefore trust that the King will consent to adhere to the original invitation, which was sent on the advice of His Majesty’s Ministers.
There was no doubt that granting the Tsar asylum in Britain would be unpopular. Lenin’s “Bloody Nicholas” moniker had entered wide circulation,32 partly due to the widespread (though false) belief the Tsarist government was behind the pogroms,33 and more broadly because of the British distaste for autocracy. The news of the British proposal had been leaked to the Liverpool Echo on 29 March, and the politically active sections of the population—liberals in the media and socialists in the labour movement—were enflamed. At the Royal Albert Hall in London on 31 March, a meeting of 12,000 people, with 5,000 more outside, chaired by former Labour MP (and future Party leader) George Lansbury had celebrated the Russian Revolution and been openly hostile to the King. Socialist Party leader Henry Hyndman had published a republican manifesto for Britain on 5 April.34 The Palace, led by Stamfordham, was thrown into a panic that if the Tsar was brought into Britain he would bring the contagion of Leftist-republican revolution with him.
Stamfordham sent Balfour a brief, passive-aggressive note on 3 April—the day Kerensky visited the fallen Tsar—accepting that the King, as a constitutional monarch, must abide by the Cabinet’s decision and “regard the matter as settled, unless the Russian Government should come to any fresh decision on the subject”.35
(A subplot during this crucial period was that King George’s mother, Alexandra of Denmark—the wife of Britain’s Edward VII (r. 1901-10), sister of Princess Dagmar Maria Feodorovna (Nicholas II’s mother), and the Kaiser’s aunt—was writing cables to Petrograd on behalf of the Dagmar, who was based in Kiev. The Queen Mother was telling Buchanan to evade official channels to deliver these letters. On 4 April, Buchanan wrote to the Foreign Office about the trouble this was causing, since in two recent notes, “One was quite harmless but the other I fear was rather compromising in its language” if made public and presented in a certain light. Buchanan was well-aware of the Okhranka’s skill in reading diplomatic mail and suspected the Provisional Government had retained at least some of their codebreakers.36)
On 6 April, Stamfordham messaged Balfour:37
Every day, the King is becoming more concerned about the question of the Emperor and Empress coming to this country. His Majesty receives letters from people in all classes … expressing adverse opinions to the proposal. As you know, from the first the King has thought the presence of the Imperial Family (especially the Empress) in this country would raise all sorts of difficulties, and I feel sure that you appreciate how awkward it will be for our Royal Family who are closely connected both with the Emperor and the Empress. … The King desires me to ask you whether after consulting the Prime Minister, Sir George Buchanan should not be communicated with, with a view to approaching the Russian Government to make some other plan for the future residence of their Imperial Majesties?
A few hours later, Stamfordham sent a second, even more forceful telegram:38
[F]rom all [the King] hears and reads in the press, the residence in this country of the ex-Emperor and Empress would be strongly resented by the public, and would undoubtedly compromise the position of the King and Queen from whom it is already generally supposed the invitation has emanated … Buchanan ought to be instructed to tell Miliukoff [Milyukov] that the opposition to the Emperor and Empress coming here is so strong that we much be allowed to withdraw from the consent previously given to the Russian Government’s proposal.
Departing from Windsor Castle, where the Royal Family was spending Easter, Stamfordham went personally to Downing Street on 10 April to inform to Lloyd George of “the King’s strong opinion that the Emperor and Empress of Russia should not come to this country”, and Stamfordham then called on Balfour to tell him the same thing. Lloyd George, having never been favourable to the plan and now being pressured by the monarchy, not to mention the internal dynamics in Russia with the Provisional Government threatened from the Left, began to reassess.39
Many histories of these events claim that in the evening of 10 April 1917, the Foreign Office released a “semi-official” statement that was then disseminated in the media, reading: “His Majesty’s Government does not insist on its former offer of hospitality to the Imperial family”. However, the statement appears to be a myth originating with Kerensky. Not only would such a statement have been most unusual on its face; it conflicts with the documented instructions of the Foreign Office (see below) to simply be quiet about the issue and hope it goes away. Research has turned up neither the original statement in the archives, nor coverage of it in the British press.40
BRITAIN WITHDRAWS ITS OFFER OF ASYLUM TO THE TSAR
There was a lag in relaying to Buchanan the change in the political situation in London. Buchanan had been told by Kerensky on 9 April that the Tsar would be unable to depart “for England for another month”; the Emperor’s papers were being gone through and he and the Tsarina were required to be available for questioning. The Tsar and his wife had been separated at Tsarskoye Selo, and Kerensky hinted there were incriminating papers about the Empress’ “pro-German sympathies”.41 Regardless, Buchanan took for granted at this time—as can be seen from his telegrams—that the only matter “was a question of delay”: this was the complaint Stamfordham lodged with Balfour at the 10 April meeting, not unreasonably suggesting that somebody should tell Buchanan “that the whole question was being reconsidered”.42
Buchanan’s daughter Meriel would later claim her father had announced receipt of “bad news from England”—the revoking of the offer for asylum to the Tsar—on 10 April, but no such cable exists. The key cable was sent at 16:00 on 13 April 1917 and was probably received by Buchanan early on the morning of 14 April. Marked “Personal and Most Confidential”, the telegram was approved by Prime Minister Lloyd George and Lord Charles Hardinge, a close associate of Balfour’s, serving as Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, having ended a stint as Viceroy of India exactly a year earlier. The cable reads [emphasis added]:43
There are indications that a considerable anti-monarchical movement is developing here, including personal attacks upon the King … It is thought that, if the Emperor comes here, it may dangerously increase this movement. It is also worth consideration whether the presence of the Emperor here might not weaken us in our dealings with the new Russian Government … Please let me have your views and in the meantime say nothing further to the Russian Government on the subject unless they themselves raise the question
Buchanan reluctantly accepted that the official invitation for the Tsar to be exiled in Britain was gone. People do not like the dissonance of carrying out a task they disagree with and will look to align actions and outlook; rationalisations start creeping in. For Buchanan, this was accomplished by adopting a narrative where his eyes had been opened to the wider political implications of having the Tsar in Britain and he could now see the wisdom of revoking the invite, even if he didn’t explicitly agree with it. An incident on 14 April gave Buchanan a concrete event to hang this new view on: two British Labour MPs, Will Thorne and James O’Grady, turned up in Petrograd, and Thorne told Buchanan that “if we were to offer His Majesty asylum in England, consequences might be very serious”—a not-so-subtle threat Labour and its Left-wing allies would create trouble.44
Reflecting Buchanan’s changed outlook, on 15 April he remarked that perhaps for the sake of avoiding providing the Russian radicals “an excuse for rousing public opinion against us” and by extension the Provisional Government, it might be better if the Tsar settled in France.45 It was at once an admission that the British offer had been revoked and, in fairness to Buchanan, an effort on his own initiative to find an alternative.
Buchanan had already approached the Provisional Government to ask for the Imperial Family to be allowed to retire to Livadia Palace in the Crimea—where the Yalta Conference would later be held—since that was surely adequately placed “to isolate [the Tsar] … as well as to provide for his protection”, but was told no-dice by representatives of the Prime Minister, Prince Georgy Lvov: “The risk of the journey would be too great”. Buchanan was resigned to the answer; his own telegrams now reflected the worries about reactions from “extreme Left parties” in Petrograd if the Tsar was moved.46
Turning to the British Ambassador in Paris, Lord Francis Bertie, the ground had been prepared by an approach from Lord Robert Cecil, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, plus private letters from Lord Hardinge and Stamfordham telling Bertie that transferring the Tsar to France would spare the King the embarrassment of letting down his cousin, while avoiding any adverse political ramifications in Britain.47 It did no good. Bertie firmly rebuffed Buchanan, explaining that the French were delighted with the fall of the Tsar, seeing in the event a parallel with their own 1789 Revolution, and added his own view in a note laced with the most sensationalist abuse against the Tsarina, drawn from the propaganda spread in Russia that had travelled abroad related to the Rasputin fiasco:48
The Empress is not only a Boche by birth but in sentiment. She did all she could to bring about an understanding with Germany. She is regarded as a criminal or a criminal lunatic and the ex-Emperor as a criminal from his weakness and submission to her promptings.
It seems the Royal household understood quickly what had happened. Pierre Gilliard, the French language teacher to the Emperor’s children, noted: “Our captivity at Tsarskoye Selo did not seem likely to last long, and there was talk about our imminent transfer to England. Yet the days passed, and our departure was always being postponed.” Gilliard puts the blame for this on the Provisional Government, which he believed was too threatened from the Left and too “afraid of responsibilities” to allow the Tsar and his entourage to leave.49 The Emperor had lamented to his diary on the day of his abdication that “all around [was] treason and cowardice and deception”,50 and when he learned of Britain’s de facto change of heart through Kerensky he felt this was further confirmation: Nicholas had no particular desire to leave Russia, but being let down by the cousin to whom he was close was a shattering experience.51
FURTHER PROPOSALS AND THEIR FINAL END
Buchanan had privately told the Provisional Government’s Foreign Minister, Milyukov, that London was no longer actively trying to relocate the Tsar to Britain, which is somewhat distinct from saying Britain had withdrawn the offer, and after the Bolsheviks forced Milyukov out as Foreign Minister on 20 May 1917, his replacement, Mikhail Tereshchenko, revived the “English mirage”, as White émigrés would later refer to the supposed British plans to get the Tsar out of Russia.52 Interestingly, it was in this period that the Kaiser issued a formal private assurance that the U-boats would leave any ship carrying the Imperial Family unmolested.53 Things were never going to get that far, though: not only was there no desire for it to succeed on the British side, but by now the political situation in Russia made it basically impossible.
The radicals in the Soviet and in garrisons like Kronstadt agitated for putting the fallen Tsar and Tsarina on trial. Never always spelled out, it was clear the radicals wanted to kill their Emperor. Accurately capturing the mood, King George wrote in his diary on 4 June: “I fear that if poor Nicky goes into the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, he will not come out alive”.54 Thus, an effort to move the Tsar into exile in this atmosphere could precipitate the very thing it was designed to prevent. Even more persuasive from the perspective of the Provisional Government was the fear that if the Tsar was allowed to get to safety, it would remove their leverage in keeping the monarchists from trying for counter-revolution; the Tsar was being kept as a bargaining counter, if not a hostage.55
In June 1917, the British government did give a formal and final end to Buchanan’s hopes that a way would be found to accept the Tsar into exile. There was some doubt about this because for a long while there was only Kerensky’s word for the story that Buchanan had, “with tears in his eyes”, gone to the Russian Foreign Ministry in late June or early July to tell Tereshchenko of “the British government’s final refusal to give refuge to the former Emperor of Russia”.56 But Tereshchenko’s account has since been found and it accords precisely with Kerensky’s, particularly about how distressed Buchanan had been. Kerensky never saw the letter and it has proved difficult to locate for a reason that is now apparent: it was “not an official typed and ciphered despatch, but a personal, handwritten letter from Hardinge, who signed it ‘Charlie’,” and it was “transmitted privately and not via official channels”.57
The nearest we have to a copy of the letter is Tereshchenko’s recollection of it: Hardinge says the Provisional Government “seeks to impress on the world’s public opinion that it endeavours to re-establish in Russia a national Russian policy, as against the pro-German tendency of the former Tsar”, and given this laudable goal it is unreasonable to expect Britain to take in the “pro-German” ex-Tsar in the midst of a war with Germany. This bizarre attribution of German sympathies to Nicholas II—who had surrendered his Throne to try to ensure victory in a war against the Second Reich—was solely based on the fact the Tsarina was a German by birth, but it was a widespread view. Even Lloyd George, who does not seem to have believed the fallen Emperor was pro-German, was relieved the “idea of asylum was dropped as it would have been used [as propaganda] by Germans”.58
The timing of Britain’s decision not to take in the fallen Tsar is significant because it comes before the “July Days”—the first Bolshevik coup attempt—and the aftermath, when the Bolsheviks were placed on the defensive, politically and practically, seen as treacherous extremists. Kerensky points out that in the period after this it was possible to move Nicholas—indeed, he was moved, out to Siberia, arriving in Tobolsk on 19 August 1917,59 and it would have been just as easy to move from Tsarskoye Selo to a British ship over the Finnish border. Milyukov says the same. The question, then, is why no effort was made along these lines. This might be understandable on the British side: the offer of asylum for the Tsar had been effectively rescinded in April and explicitly withdrawn in June. It is more of a question on the Russian side, since the Provisional Government had still raised the matter again in May, when the Bolsheviks were much stronger, having just forced the removal of Milyukov.
The simple answer is, as Kerensky himself elsewhere admits, that even with the Bolsheviks at their lowest ebb in late July and August 1917, the Provisional Government remained under the thumb of the radicals (very much including the Bolsheviks) in the Petrograd Soviet, who did not want to allow the fallen Tsar into exile.60 Moreover, it was Kerensky who assisted the Bolsheviks into power: rather than ride the patriotic surge after the defeat of what everyone believed was a German-sponsored Bolshevik putsch by coming to terms with constitutional conservatives, the paranoid Kerensky staged a provocation against the military in the “Kornilov Affair”, doing mortal damage to the two institutions—his own government and the Army—that provided any kind of check on the Bolsheviks. Indeed, Kerensky actually armed the Bolsheviks against the entirely imaginary threat of “Kornilovism”, giving them weapons they would turn against him three months later as they took power.
The last documented show of concern from George V about his cousin while he was alive is a request to Stamfordham on 5 August 1917 to get clarification from the Cabinet about whether the Imperial Family had been moved from Tsarskoye Selo; by the time Buchanan was able to answer, the Romanovs were already in Siberia.61
The final appearance of a British hand in rescue efforts for the Romanovs appears in early 1918. Jonas Lied, a Norwegian businessman and adventurer, who had been granted Russian citizenship years earlier and felt a great loyalty to the Romanovs, had gone to London on 4 March 1918 and been deputised to deal with the Bolsheviks to protect British commercial interests. While there, Lied floated a proposal to rescue the Imperial Family and London briefly considered it. But after Lied met with Sir Francis Barker, director of the engineering and armaments firm Vickers, on 20 March, and Barker told the British government that the plan was, while technically “feasible”, “daring and certainly most romantic”, any official enthusiasm for the scheme faded. Lied would have had to wait until late June 1918, once the ice had melted and a ship could be used to get the Romanovs out of Tobolsk to Murmansk. The Lied plan has been the subject of much historical speculation, a lot of it wish-thinking or accusatory from Russian monarchists and British intelligence officials, but the basic fact of London’s reticence to have the Imperial Family in Britain remained, and it seems there was a (justified) scepticism about Lied’s capacity to do what he planned. Other stories about British plans to get the Tsar to Archangel over land do not seem credible. Lied had some contact with the British intelligence station inside Russia, which was well-disposed towards a rescue effort, but if or what support he received from them is unknown and probably unknowable since British records are—predictably—entirely silent on the Lied proposal.62
THE LAST DAYS OF THE TSAR
The Provisional Government fell to the Bolshevik coup on 7 November 1917, immediately plunging Russia into civil war, as Lenin had always wanted: only through a cataclysmic domestic war could the Bolsheviks have tabula rasa to implant a bridgehead of Revolution and take it out to the world.63 The Bolsheviks had discussed what to do with the fallen Tsar immediately after seizing power, but no decision was made, and for four months, up to March 1918, the Bolsheviks paid the Romanovs, who had all withdrawn from public life, no heed. This would change with the rapidly moving events over the four months after that.
The Bolshevik regime signed, under pressure from a German military offensive deep into Russian territory, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany on 3 March 1918, a Carthaginian “peace” that dismembered Russia and left large parts of the old Empire under Central Powers occupation. Even in the Bolshevik camp, this treaty was immensely unpopular, and it solidified the widespread perception that the Bolshevik regime was a German proxy.64 It was a bitter irony that one of the most effective lines of revolutionary propaganda was portraying the Empress during her de facto Regency over Russia in 1915-17 as a German agent.65 “To think that they called Her Majesty a traitress!” Nicholas exclaimed when news came in of what had been signed at Brest-Litovsk. “Who is the real traitor?” The Tsarina directed her ire at the Kaiser: “petty” as she thought her cousin was, she never dreamed “he could sink down as far as coming to terms with the Bolsheviks. What a disgrace!” When told that there was newspaper reporting the Treaty contained secret clauses for the transfer of the Imperial Family out of the country, she harshly responded: “I would rather die in Russia than be saved by the Germans”.66
It does not seem that the Bolsheviks ever learned of it, but in the last days of March 1918 there were vague plans for an “internal” rescue for the Imperial Family. The Emperor was not involved, but the family physician, Dr. Eugene Botkin, was in contact with a military officer, Alexander Ievreinov, a link to monarchist circles in Petrograd, who had ideas about getting the Royals out of the Governor’s Mansion (Kuklin House) where they were imprisoned, now under Bolshevik supervision. Botkin placed a lot of faith in Colonel Eugene Kobylinsky, the leader of the guard detachment during the Romanovs’ house arrest in Tsarskoye Selo. The logistics alone defeated this plan, which were built on the proposals Lied had made: the only viable path involved waiting for the unfreezing of the rivers, by which time it was too late.67
The anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army—often known as the “Whites”—had been created in January 1918 from military officers and soldiers (a number of them Jewish, interestingly, given the later historiography), liberal politicians, patriotic intellectuals and students, and some factions of Cossacks to fight for the Constituent Assembly, the body disbanded by the Bolsheviks that had been created after Russia’s first genuine election in late 1917, which the Bolsheviks had lost. Forged down in the Kuban, this rag-tag outfit of 4,000 men had been forced to leave Rostov in late February 1918 when the local Cossacks had turned on them as the Bolshevik army closed in and on 13 April the Volunteers’ co-leader, General Lavr Kornilov, had been killed, leading Lenin to declare: “We can say with confidence that in the main the civil war is at an end.” But the Volunteers survived: trekking 750 miles through the Kuban over eighty days, in the depths of winter, harried at every stage by the Bolsheviks, the Volunteers, now led by General Anton Denikin, arrived back where they started in mid-May—by which time, the Cossacks had had a taste of Red Terror and risen in rebellion, joining the Volunteers’ struggle.68
Days after Rostov in the south-west of Russia was taken by Denikin’s forces, to the east, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Czech Legion mutinied. The Bolshevik government, under German pressure, had issued an order to prevent the evacuation of the Czechs, who had been stranded in Russia through a complex series of events, because the evacuated Czechs were being shipped to France to add to the Allied divisions on the Western Front. The order had been largely unenforced. This changed after a random altercation between the Czech troops and a Hungarian prisoner of war on 14 May 1918. Leon Trotsky, newly appointed Commissar of War, responded by issuing a new order to completely disarm the Czechs, press them into Bolshevik forced labour battalions, and put them in concentration camps if they resisted. It was an insane order for Trotsky to issue, given the Bolsheviks did not have an army worth the name at this point and the Czech Legion was far and away the most powerful force in Siberia. The only thing the order achieved was that when the Czechs, to that point friendly with the Bolsheviks, heard it, they assumed the Bolsheviks intended to hand them over to the Germans and it provoked them to rebellion. Even after the Czechs seized the railway, they still for a time eschewed contact with the Russian anti-Bolshevik liberals and Leftists who approached them, hoping simply to get out of Russia. The logic of things took over, however, and the Czechs were soon taking town after town, and fraternising with the anti-Bolshevik forces. Within a few weeks, the Czechs had deprived the Bolsheviks of control of most of Siberia,69 and, in their wake, in the space cleared, an anti-Bolshevik government began to take hold that would come to be led by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak.
It was in the aftermath of the Czech revolt that the Bolsheviks became aware that some German officials—particularly at the Moscow Embassy—were not only analytically convinced that the Bolshevik regime could not last but had canvassed around for alternatives,70 and there were German military officials known to have monarchist views.71 A development that strengthened the argument of these officials within the German government was that within Russia, where Nicholas’ abdication had been greeted a year earlier with a collective national shrug, there was now a detectable surge in support for the fallen Emperor.72
This was the point where Lenin first ordered the murder of Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas’ brother to whom he had tried to cede the Throne after the “February Revolution”, on 13 June 1918, to test the waters of domestic and international reaction, and then ordered the murder of the Imperial Family, who had been transferred to Ekaterinburg on 30 April. The fallen Tsar, his wife, his five children, and four members of the Imperial Family’s staff—the proletarians the Communists supposedly represented—were slaughtered by the Bolsheviks in a horrifying blood-stained frenzy in a basement just after 2 a.m. on 17 July 1918.
The historiography of the massacre of the Imperial Family, as well as often trying to lead away from Lenin in terms of responsibility, frequently presents it as a decision taken by the Bolsheviks in a panic, and given the context laid out above, one can understand why. But it is not true. The chaos that swept around the nascent Bolshevik regime in the spring of 1918 was seen by Lenin as an opportunity to do what he had always wanted to do: to make a statement about the nature of his Revolution, its intention to destroy everything about the old world, including its morality, where defenceless captives and children were off-limits; to demoralise the enemy forces, as he perceived them,73 and to eliminate any possibility of a Restoration; and, very much related, to ensure that those who had joined the Bolshevik cause understood there was no way back: they were now stained with the blood of their Emperor and would stand or fall with Lenin’s regime.
INTERNATIONAL REACTION
While the reaction within Russia to the massacre of the Imperial Family was quite muted—amid the ocean of blood from the Bolshevik Terror, it was a drop74—the reaction abroad was rather more significant, if only because there was a widespread effort to shift blame.
The one European monarch who behaved with a shred of principle throughout the whole ordeal was Spain’s King Alfonso XIII (r. 1886-1931), who would lose his own throne to Leftist radicals. Alfonso made direct approaches to the Bolshevik government and offered sanctuary to the fallen Tsar and his family, without the great performance of concern for his own stability or worries about interfering in the “internal affairs” of a regime that rejected the concept. In his Siberian exile, the fallen Tsar had remarked on Alfonso—a man he had never met—as his “one loyal friend”.75 As late as August 1918, when Nicholas and little Alexei were known to be dead, Alfonso was still doing everything he could to try to take the Empress and the girls to safety; the Leninist government strung him along for a time to obfuscate their crime.76
British intelligence learned on 31 August 1918 that the whole family had perished with Nicholas, and Stamfordham was one of the first to be informed of this by the War Office.77 Stamfordham’s reaction was one of near-unbelievable hypocrisy, lamenting the “callous indifference to a tragedy of this magnitude”: “Where is our national sympathy … ?” These were questions better asked when there was still time for Britain to do something—notably during the period Stamfordham was feeding the worst fears of a skittish King. Stamfordham now wept crocodile tears over the Tsar’s “sufferings … during the past year”, as if Stamfordham was not a significant cause of those sufferings, and the Kaiser was blamed for not securing Nicholas’ release as part of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.78
Blaming the Kaiser has been something of a feature of British commentary, media and official, on the massacre of the Russian Imperial Family. This might be called prejudice or projection, and both things would be true; it is also true that there is a real point here. At Brest-Litovsk, the Kaiser could have demanded the Romanovs be turned over to Germany as part of the price for peace, and the Bolsheviks would have had to comply. The Kaiser cannot claim the issue didn’t arise: in early March 1918, the Danish King Christian X (r. 1912-47) asked the Kaiser to get the fallen Tsar out of Russia, and around the same time the Swedish King Gustaf V (r. 1907-50) asked that the Kaiser at least do something to ease the conditions the Romanovs were living in. The Kaiser refused, saying Germany could not take in the Tsar, lest it appear Berlin was working for a restoration of the Russian monarchy. Since the Kaiser and some of his officials at times did consider that option, the more likely reason for the Kaiser’s refusal to grant refuge to the Tsar is the exact reason George V refused: he feared it would excite Left-wing opinion and cause domestic trouble.79
As for George V, the note he made in his diary on the night of 31 August was that it was “too horrible and shows what fiends these Bolshevists are. … [T]hose poor innocent children!” Even at this point, however, the animus to the Tsarina was evident, with the King writing: “For poor Alicky, perhaps it was best so”.80
THE QUESTION OF RESPONSIBILITY
There was dispute for a long while over the British withdrawal of the invitation to the Tsar. Milyukov and Kerensky had publicly said the British had withdrawn the offer, at least for as long as the war was going on, for domestic reasons of their own. Buchanan denied this in his memoirs, My Mission to Russia (1923), saying “Our offer remained open” and the inhibiting factor was on the Russian side, specifically the dynamics within the socialist camp in Petrograd spread between the Provisional Government and the Soviet. In his memoir, The Catastrophe (1927), Kerensky reiterated his contradiction of Buchanan’s version of events, and the British Foreign Office took the unusual step of issuing a statement calling Kerensky a liar.
It was the memoir of Buchanan’s daughter, Meriel, The Dissolution of an Empire (1932), which—though it is not always reliable in detail, as she herself knew81—first made public the version of events in broad outline that can now be read in the cables, as has been set out above, namely that her father had been given instructions he did not like to revoke the offer of hospitality extended to the Russian Imperial Family by the British government.82 Buchanan had wanted to include this in his own book, wrote Meriel, but he had been “told at the Foreign Office” that if he did “he would not only be charged with an infringement of the Official Secrets Act, but would have his pension stopped”. As such, she says, Buchanan’s memoir is “a deliberate attempt to suppress the true facts”.83
Once the historical fact that Britain had withdrawn the offer of refuge was accepted, it was often believed that it was Lloyd George who was responsible: this was the narrative of Meriel Buchanan, and when Lloyd George was asked for comment on her book, his spokesman said that while Lloyd George had “no clear recollection … he probably did advise against” allowing the Tsar to come to Britain.84 This could be true, but it is clear that the driver of the decision was George V and that Lloyd George willingly played along with deflecting blame from the King.85 On 11 April 1919, Colonel D.S. Robertson, the acting British High Commissioner based in Vladivostok, sent a preliminary report to London detailing the massacre of the Romanovs. The King had read Robertson’s report “with horror”, Stamfordham wrote to the Foreign Office, and “His Majesty would much prefer that nothing of this account be published”. On the whole issue of the Imperial Family, this would remain the British position: a lot of official documents were finessed (often by Stamfordham) or redacted, and in the case of the secret service files kept hidden or outright eliminated.86 To the extent anything negative leaked out about how the British handled the issue of the Tsar’s asylum, and blame had to be given, Lloyd George, and to a much lesser extent Buchanan, took the rap.87
There are two caveats about George V’s responsibility: (1) Lloyd George might be said to have had an indirect role in the decision to deny British assistance to the Tsar, since press magnates close to Lloyd George provided some of the coverage that Stamfordham used to sway the King’s views;88 and (2) most descriptions of these events go too far in exculpating the Russian side: there is a question over whether the political situation in Petrograd would ever have allowed the Imperial Family to leave Russia.89
When Buchanan defended himself, in a public exchange in 1923 with Princess Olga Paley,90 by saying, “Our offer remained open and was never withdrawn”, he was clearly lying,91 but he was on firmer footing in saying: “If advantage was not taken of [the offer], it was because the Provisional Government failed to overcome the opposition of the Soviet. They were not, as I asserted and as I repeat, masters in their own house”.92 None other than Kerensky—who as mentioned went to great lengths to publicly blame the British in the 1920s—conceded that “even if the Provisional Government had wanted to remove the former Tsar abroad, it would not have been able to do so, because the [Petrograd Soviet] would not have allowed it”.93
All that said, had Britain been determined to act it is unlikely it could have been impeded by either the weak Provisional Government in 1917 or the Bolshevik regime in 1918.94 The central fact remains: the King had panicked, becoming convinced—under the influence of Stamfordham above all—that he would threaten his own throne by helping the cousin he professed to care so much for. In the course of events, this betrayal did more damage to the prestige of the Sovereign than any short-term hit from admitting Nicholas and his family.95 A King’s role is to take the difficult decisions for the good of the nation’s interests, regardless of the passions swaying the populace at any one moment; such a blatant act of cowardice for such ignoble reasons—pandering to the mob because of exaggerated worries about short-term popularity—cost the monarchy a good deal of respect when the heat of the moment passed and people could assess the situation more objectively.
George V’s actions are interesting as a measure of the monarchy’s remaining power over the British political system in 1917. It is often said the “Bedchamber crisis” in 1839 was the last major action of a British monarch before the role became ceremonial, and perhaps this is true domestically. But in foreign affairs, Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901) herself had prevailed over her Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, in the early 1860s, to prevent a pro-Danish intervention over Schleswig-Holstein, clearing the way for Otto von Bismarck to settle the issue by force, the first of his three crushing military victories on the way to creating a German Union. What George V did, in being the decisive voice to refuse refuge to the Tsar, was of far greater world historical impact than anything his grandmother had done during her long reign.
Two things can at least be said in George V’s favour. First, he worked as best he could for the rest of his life to avoid Britain deepening relations with the Soviet Union,96 and, second, he used this vestigial power of the monarchy to prevent the fate of the Tsar being visited on some of the remaining Romanovs, as it certainly would have been—after the murder of the Imperial Family, Lenin had continued on a killing spree against the Romanovs and those connected with the Royal household who were still in Russia. In April 1919, the same day as the King read Robertson’s telegram, the British battleship HMS Marlborough landed at Yalta and carried about fifty Russians, seventeen of them Romanovs, to safety.97 The Marlborough mission, directed by George V, was clearly an act of contrition, but in many ways it underlined what a terrible thing he had done. The arrival of the Tsar’s mother, the Dagmar, in Britain on 9 May 1919, showed what might have been: her brief stay in Britain stirred up no reaction and the Dagmar then went to live in Denmark at the expense of her nephew, King Christian X.98
Post has been updated
REFERENCES
Nicholas was heavily influenced in this belief by his childhood mentor Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who was, from 1880 to 1905, the Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod, essentially the Cabinet Minister overseeing the Russian Orthodox Church. This belief was not unique to the Russian Emperor. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888-1918) once declared: “[The Prussian Crown] was conferred by the grace of God alone, and not by parliaments or popular decisions. … I myself am an instrument of the Lord”.
In the wake of the issuance of the October Manifesto in 1905, Russia moved a long way towards being a constitutional monarchy in practice, even as the Emperor and most Russians continued to believe that autocracy was the correct form of government in principle for the country. The Duma (Parliament) established in 1906 gained a substantive role in the political process in Russia. The guarantees of civil liberties in the Manifesto ensured that the press was relatively free—the remaining censorship practices were more irritating than stifling and broadly in-line with the contemporary restrictions on the media in Western states—and there was broad respect for free speech and association, as well as the lifting of most remaining restrictions on the national minorities. The peasantry had been emancipated in full, with what was left of the burdensome redemption fees “owed” by former serfs cancelled. And trades unions were legalised: the movement would go on to extract serious concessions on conditions and pay for workers. See: John Thompson and Christopher Ward, Russia: A Historical Introduction from Kievan Rus’ to the Present, chapter ten.
Tibor Szamuely (1974), The Russian Tradition, pp. 339-43.
About 9,000 casualties were inflicted by the terrorists from late 1905 to the end of 1907, half of them government officials and half of them private citizens. See: Anna Geifman (1993), Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917, pp. 20-1.
Nicholas was concerned that repressive measures in 1905 would further alienate Russia’s liberals, and make Russia appear as an Asiatic backwater to Western Europe. See: Thou Shalt Kill, p. 223.
Thou Shalt Kill, pp. 22-3, 210-22.
The Okhranka were better prepared in general in 1905 than in 1881-82, when the pogroms erupted in the midst of a police reorganisation and took the state off-guard. That said, on the specific issue of the pogroms, the same problem recurred in 1905-07, particularly after the October Manifesto, which was deeply unpopular. In the two weeks after the October Manifesto, about 350 population centres were attacked and 1,600 people killed, with another 3,500 injured. The violence concentrated in Ukraine and Jews were the single largest victim group of these outbreaks, about half of fatalities and 40% of the wounded. But the attacks had fallen on other minorities seen as supporting the Manifesto, too: inter alia Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Armenians, liberals, and students. Radicals at the time and much historiography since portrays the antisemitic disturbances as orchestrated by the Tsarist government to deflect popular rage onto an unpopular minority; there is simply no evidence for this, and voluminous evidence that high officials regarded disorder of all kinds with horror and worked to suppress it. The problem was one of capacity, not will. Faced with popular revulsion fanned by reactionary demagogues and channelled against Jews and others, at the same time as a heightened terrorist campaign from Left-wing radicals who smelled blood, an overstretched state failed in many cases to act decisively to quell mob violence. See: Charles Ruud and Sergei Stepanov (1999), Fontanka 16: The Tsar’s Secret Police, pp. 237-41.
Thou Shalt Kill, pp. 226-27.
It was during the 1905-07 terrorist wave that Vladimir Lenin had started calling Nicholas II “Кровавый” (Krovavyi)—variously translated as the “Bloody”, “Bloodstained”, “Sanguinary”, “Murderous”—and this gained wider circulation after it was used in a speech by a Duma deputy in December 1910. The deputy, oddly, was Vladimir Purishkevich, an ultra-Rightist monarchist, whose speech almost exactly six years later precipitated the second and successful conspiracy to eliminate Grigori Rasputin, which he was brought into. Purishkevich had been trying to save the monarchy from itself, but after the abdication of the Tsar he was to become an unlikely ally to the liberals in the Provisional Government.
Thou Shalt Kill, pp. 231-32. What helped truly gut the legitimacy of terrorism and send it into a terminal decline was the revelation, in December 1908, that the leader of the Combat Organisation of the Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs), Evno Azef, had been an Okhranka agent. This was a disastrous failure of the Tsar’s intelligence system and, as it happened, Azef was far from a loyal agent of the Imperial government—he was involved in many of the worst atrocities by the revolutionaries, and his allegiance, especially in the 1905-08 period, tended to shift depending on whether the government or terrorist-revolutionaries had the upper hand. Nonetheless, the revelation redounded to the state’s benefit and dealt a mortal blow to the credibility of terrorism as a tactic among the rank-and-file of the revolutionary groups. See: Fontanka 16, pp. 149-51 and Thou Shalt Kill, pp. 232-37.
“[W]ithout German approval, the Austrians are highly unlikely to have acted as they did [in issuing an impossible ultimatum to Serbia]. … A decade after their defeat by the Japanese the Russians were busily rebuilding their armed forces, a process that would be complete by about 1916-17. At the War Council [of 8 December] 1912 [German Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von] Moltke clearly had this in mind when arguing for war. … If Germany did not strike soon, the argument went, her international position would deteriorate further. … Germany thus needed Austria-Hungary to take strong action against Serbia … [and] bring about a pretext for war. … Germany’s behaviour in July 1914 was the most important single factor in bringing about the First World War. The German leadership wanted hegemony in Europe and was prepared to go to war to achieve it. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, the ‘war guilt clause’, … was, therefore, fundamentally correct.” See: Gary Sheffield (2001), Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities, pp. 37-9.
The two leading civilian advocates for Russia’s involvement in what would become the First World War were Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko and Duma deputy Alexander Guchkov, both members of the liberal Octobrist Party. See: Simon Sebag Montefiore (2016), The Romanovs: 1613-1918, pp. 570-77.
A lot of the practical work commanding the Russian Army after September 1915 was carried out by General Mikhail Alekseyev.
The great what-if about the summer of 1916 is “if Romania had entered the war in late June rather than on 27 August [whether] the Central Powers’ armies would have been stretched so thinly that somewhere their perimeter defences would have given way” [Forgotten Victory, pp. 184-85]. The Brusilov Offensive was in some ways a victim of its own success: it had an “an electrifying effect on Russian morale” and convinced the Romanians to come in on Russia’s side, but because Romania did so after the moment had passed, the Germans were able to regroup and with the Bulgarians invaded Romania in October 1916, capturing Bucharest in December, having drawn the Russians into a side-fight they had not planned on, increasing casualties and dampening the sense of unalloyed success. Nonetheless, to any onlooker, “If any multi-ethnic empire stood on the brink [at the dawn of] 1917, it would surely be the tottering dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, not Russia” [Sean McMeekin (2017), The Russian Revolution: A New History, chapter four].
McMeekin, The Russian Revolution, chapter twelve.
It had been the main task of the Okhranka in its last years to stop this liberal-radical coalition forming, in effect to save the liberals from themselves, but the liberal attraction to the radicals was too great. See: Fontanka 16, p. 321.
Michael Kalantar (2015), Russia Under Three Tsars, chapter three.
Of many legends about Rasputin’s life and death, one of the most enduring is that his slaying was a British operation to stop Russia signing a separate peace, since Rasputin was known to have been firmly in the “anti-war” camp. Britain certainly knew of the impending conspiracy against Rasputin [The Romanovs, p. 604], but there is no good evidence that Samuel Hoare, the station chief in Petrograd for what would become SIS/MI6, orchestrated the assassination, let alone that Oswald Rayner, one of Hoare’s officers, was involved.
Rodney Carlisle (2007), World War I, p. 136
Forgotten Victory, pp. 71-3.
Michael Neiberg (2016), The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America, pp. 24-5.
The Path to War, pp. 197-98.
Miranda Carter (2010), George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, p. 399-400.
George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, pp. 400-01.
Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalev (1995), The Fall of the Romanovs, p. 119.
Virginia Rounding (2012), Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina, chapter twelve.
Richard Pipes (1990), The Russian Revolution, p. 313.
Alexander III, in immense pain as his end approached, refused to wear comfortable clothing, insisting on continuing to wear a stiff military uniform. Not a word of complaint was uttered by Alexander III in the presence of anybody but his wife, and he continued the full spectrum of his duties, having all papers redirected to him down in the Crimea. Once Alexander III accepted he was dying, doctors were virtually banished from his household. When one of the few medics left in the Tsar’s Palace asked who had given him permission to defy doctor’s orders to remain in bed, Alexander III replied: “I am doing it with the permission of the Emperor of Russia.” See: Russia Under Three Tsars, chapter two.
Helen Rappaport (2018), The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 73-4.
Buchanan wrote that “the loss of his Throne does not seem to have depressed [Nicholas]”, who was content to spend the time with his family (and record the minutiae of daily life in his diary), but the Tsarina “feels the humiliation of her present position deeply” and nurses hopes of counter-revolution. See: The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 104.
George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, p. 401.
See footnote nine.
The Tsardom had failed, in 1881-82 and 1905-06, to respond adequately to the outbreaks of popular violence against Jews, but this was a matter of capacity not intent: the Imperial government had been taken by surprise at the former and consumed with a terrorist revolution during the latter wave. The overriding concern, always and everywhere, was order and stability, with high officials fully understanding the dangers of popular unrest, even when nominally undertaken by allies of the Tsardom, hence the Okhranka’s dual mission to suppress Left-wing terrorist-revolutionaries and Right-wing Fighting Squads of the Black Hundreds. See: Fontanka 16, pp. 101-21, 226-45.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 70-2.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 71.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 75.
Catrine Clay (2007), King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War, p. 340.
George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, p. 402.
George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, p. 403.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 103.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 81.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 82-3.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 83.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 84.
Robert Massie (2000 [originally 1967]), Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, P. 461.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 84.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 84-5.
Nicholas and Alexandra, p. 461.
Pierre Gilliard (1921), Thirteen Years at the Russian Court: The Last Years of the Romanov Tsar and His Family by an Eyewitness, p. 138.
Richard Pipes (1993), Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime: 1919–1924, p. 166.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 336.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 109.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 109-10.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 106.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 103-06.
Nicholas and Alexandra, p. 462.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 107-08.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 108-09.
The debacle of the “Kerensky offensive” and the Bolshevik coup attempt in July 1917 convinced the Provisional Government it was the better part of wisdom to move the Imperial Family away from the capital. The Tsar went uncomplainingly to Tobolsk, telling Kerensky he trusted his judgment: “If you say that we must move, it must be so”. See: The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 119.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 271.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 144.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 153-60.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 396.
Evan Mawdsley (1987), The Russian Civil War, pp. 47-59.
Kerensky wrote in his memoirs [spellings standardised]: “I never really succeeded in understanding [Empress] Alexandra Feodorovna or in discovering what her real aims had been, but of the members of her circle whom I met (Voyeikova, [the Empress’ best friend Anna] Vyroubova, [the last Interior Minister Alexander] Protopopov) she was undoubtedly the cleverest and the strongest, and no one could have made a fool of her. As I never saw Rasputin, I am unable to judge what influence or, rather, what hypnotic force he possessed. … It is clear that some one cleverer and better versed in politics than all those Vyroubovas and Protopopovs was using them to further his or her own policy. I do not know who that person was. … Whether she herself decided to make peace with Germany and chose the government of Protopopov, [the last War Minister Mikhail] Belyaev, [the last Justice Minister Ivan] Shcheglovitov, [one of the last Prime Ministers Boris] Shturmer, and others, for this purpose, or whether some one behind her inspired her course of action is more or less immaterial. The outstanding fact is that she was the de facto head of the government that was leading the country straight into a separate peace. Whether any member of the Rasputin-Vyroubova circle was actually a German agent is not certain, but undoubtedly a whole German organization was sheltered behind them and they were, at any rate, quite ready to receive money and gifts of all kinds.”
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 168-69.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 142-43.
Dimitry Lehovich (1974), White Against Red: The Life of General Anton Denikin, p. 198.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, pp. 626-31.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, pp. 653-61.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 746.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 747. There is earlier evidence that a lot of the public hostility to the Tsar in the post-revolutionary period was what we would now call performative: adopted as a self-protective measure in an atmosphere were the radicals had the guns. In Tsarskoe Selo, the soldiers guarding the Family “loudly declared that they would not sit at the same table with Nicholas Romanov” when the fallen Emperor walked into a room, but “when the soldiers were not looking, most of the officers apologized, explaining that they feared being brought before the soldiers’ tribunal and accused of being counterrevolutionaries” [Nicholas and Alexandra, p. 462]. In Tobolsk, the local population, hearing that their Tsar was living without money and was running short of food, “were constantly asking Botkin to smuggle in gifts of sugar, pies and jam, which he did inside his large English overcoat” [The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 140].
“Whites” was a term given by the Bolsheviks to the Volunteer Army, meant to summon the memory of the restored French Bourbons. Contrary to popular belief, however, the “Whites” were not monarchists and were not fighting for the Tsar’s restoration. As mentioned, the declared political program of the “Whites” was the restoration of the elected Constituent Assembly of the republican Provisional Government, and in a country where it would have been advantageous to play on popular sentiment that was habituated to monarchy, the Volunteers’ messaging never did so.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 783.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 267.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 254-55.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 261-62.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 253-54.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 780.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 261-62.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 274.
Nicholas and Alexandra, p. 462.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 272.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 275.
Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p. 336.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 267-70.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 280.
Max Aitken, later made Baron Beaverbrook by Lloyd George, was the owner of The Daily Express and The Globe. Aitken had been a key player in Asquith’s Liberal government falling and was then a key supporter of the coalition government headed by Lloyd George. Aitken’s papers pumped out slanderous material about the Tsarina, depicting her as a German agent whose scheming on behalf of the Kaiser had provoked the Russian population to rebel and warning it would be “suicidal” to bring her to Britain where she could continue these activities. See: The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 80.
Pierre Gilliard, the French tutor to the Tsar’s children who spent time with the Imperial Family under house arrest, noted in his memoirs that “we were only a few hours by railway from the Finnish frontier, and the necessity of passing through Petrograd was the only serious obstacle. … [I]f the authorities had acted resolutely and secretly it would not have been difficult to get the Imperial Family … to some foreign country.” But the Provisional Government was, as well as “afraid of responsibilities”, threatened by what Gilliard called “the advanced wing” (the extreme-Left parties like the Bolsheviks) to whom “its authority was slipping away” [Thirteen Years at the Russian Court, p. 138]. Pipes bluntly says: “Given the sentiments of the Ispolkom, it was unlikely ever to have approved the government’s plans to allow Nicholas to leave for England” [The Russian Revolution, p. 336].
Wife of the Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich.
Lloyd George’s War Memoirs (1938) repeated the same story as Buchanan: “The invitation was not withdrawn” and the decision not to take it came from the Provisional Government, “which continued to place obstacles in the way of the Czar’s departure”. It is notable that this published version of Lloyd George’s memoirs came about after the entire chapter on the issue of the Tsar’s asylum was suppressed, despite being simply a dry record of events, because it made the government look weak and implicated the King in the decision to back away from the offer of safe harbour to the Russian Emperor. It was not until Albert Sylvester, Lloyd George’s Principal Private Secretary, published his diaries in the 1970s that the truth about the pressure Lloyd George had been put under in 1934 to scrap the original version of the chapter on refusing the Tsar refuge became known. See: The Race to Save the Romanovs, pp. 274-78.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 273.
The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 271.
Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, p. 74
George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, p. 405.
Britain and the Soviet Union had signed a trade deal in March 1921, mere months after the final collapse of the anti-Bolshevik “Whites” that Britain nominally supported and days after Lenin had announced the “New Economic Policy” that set aside—temporarily—some of the dogmatic aspects of socialism in the midst of domestic crises (a massive peasant revolt and the mutiny at Kronstadt) and foreign problems (the unsettled war with Poland). Britain gave formal recognition to the Soviet government in February 1924, and then withdrew it again in May 1927 after the Soviet efforts to spread Communist subversion became so extensive it led to a police raid on their trade delegation in London, the so-called ARCOS Affair. With the accession to power of the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald (r. 1929-35), Britain made the first move in trying to restore diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R.—to the extreme distaste of George V. The King believed he should not be made to shake hands with “the murderers of his relatives”. When the Soviet ambassador returned to London in 1929 and tried to present his credentials at Buckingham Palace, George V refused to meet him, pleading illness. In 1933, the King was furious at being forced to shake hands with the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov. See: George, Nicholas and Wilhelm, p. 423.
Frances Welch (2011), The Russian Court at Sea: The Last Days of a Great Dynasty: The Romanov Voyage into Exile.
To her dying day in October 1928, the Dagmar maintained hope that her son was alive. See: The Race to Save the Romanovs, p. 269.