Read Online The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II by Donald Crawford - Free Book Online

started. Hostile crowds broke the windows of her carriage and tore down the blinds, until police intervened. On orders from the Kaiser, her train was allowed to continue on to neutral Denmark, and from there she got back via Sweden and Finland. 27
     
    Returning home to the Anichkov Palace she was naturally anxious to see Michael, albeit without Natasha, but accepted that this time he would set up home with her. There would be no further demands that they lived separately, or were not to be seen in public together. She would still be Madame Brasova, but she was also his wife, and that was a fact which it was pointless now to deny. There was also a war on. Nonetheless, there could be no question of her ever living in an imperial palace — that would be a step too far. Given that, Michael would never again live in one either.
     
    On arriving back in the capital, Michael and Natasha had booked into the Hotel de l’Europ e, 28 near the Anichkov Palace but on the other side of the Nevsky Prospekt. That was something they could never have done two years earlier, but the real question now was where should they make their home?
     
    Michael was in doubt about that: it had to be his beloved Gatchina. The Blue Cuirassiers were on their way to the front line; there would be no more insults from them, and local society would have to learn that Natasha was no longer to be reviled as before.
     
    The decision made, he and Natasha waited until her ‘hideaway house’ at 24 Nikolaevskaya Street, securely locked up when the children had left to join them in Cannes two years earlier, was re-opened and made a home again, though it was so run-down that Natasha was ashamed of it. She would get it right eventually, but as it stood it was the last place anyone would expect to find a Grand Duke. Nonetheless, Michael liked it so much he also bought the property next door, to house guests as well as some of his staff. 29
     
    With that, he was ready to go to war.
     

9. PALACE PLOTTERS
     
    WHEN Michael and Natasha returned to Gatchina at the New Year of 1917 it was to find that the death of Rasputin had done nothing to ease tension, for it had provided drama but no other tangible improvement in political conditions. The government had not fallen, the hated Protopopov was still interior minister, claiming that he was now guided by Rasputin’s ghost, 1 and Alexandra was still effectively Regent, grieving but otherwise unchanged in her purpose. The only desperate action had come from an officer who attempted to assassinate her on December 28 en route between the palace and her hospital in Tsarskoe Selo. Caught, he was hanged next morning, although his arrest and execution were kept ‘absolutely secret’. 2
     
    Nevertheless, there was still hopes of a palace coup, as there had been before Christmas when there had been hot-headed talk by the three Vladimirovich brothers — Grand Dukes Kirill, Boris and Andrew — of a night march on Tsarskoe Selo by four Guards regiments. This excited plot, aimed at the seizure of Alexandra and her despatch to some faraway convent, came to nothing since only the three brothers believed it to be possible. Even so, they continued to press the case for it.
     
    At one champagne supper party, Boris was reported to have been discussing the timing and the regiments which could be used, seemingly indifferent to the fact that the whole conversation could be overheard by servants, gypsy singers and with ‘harlots looking on and listening’, noted Paléologue in his diary for January 9. 3
     
    Nicholas made clear that he was prepared to face any family challenge head on. After Dimitri’s departure, a letter from his father Grand Duke Paul, asking the Tsar to revoke his order, was returned to him with a note scribbled in the margin: ‘No one has the right to kill...’ 4 Bimbo, who had added his name to the letter, was banished to his remote estate on New Year’s Day and it was enough to stop any family rebellion in