Although Nicholas and his family lived comfortably on the Provisional Government’s subsidy, his relatives faced shakier conditions. Grand Duke Georgi Mikhailovich retired to his Finnish estate at Ritierve. Finland had been an autonomous region under Russian rule since 1809, and although Helsinki and other cities experienced revolutionary disturbances as Finns demanded independence, the countryside was quiet enough for Georgi Mikhailovich to imagine that he could escape the Petrograd turmoil.
He quickly experienced the effects of the general economic collapse and was no longer able to run the estate in the old way. As his finances went into the red, he had to fire his many servants in order to balance the books. He felt bad about this, but his conscience was clear, he said, because he had simply run out of funds. The servants themselves returned to their home villages in the hope of lasting out the turbulent conditions. Georgi kept his head down. He had always thought – like Nicholas in March 1917 – that the best option would be to obtain a place of refuge in England, and he discreetly explored the possibilities over several months. His daughter Xenia was already living there, in Worthing, where by chance she had found herself at the start of the war. They kept up an affectionate correspondence – he poured his passion into his concern for her. At the same time he denounced the ‘scoundrels’ in the British government who refused him a visa – he reserved his greatest contempt for Ambassador Buchanan, whom he accused of mischievously thwarting his method of using the services of a friendly Norwegian diplomat to send his letters to the United Kingdom.1
On 11 July 1917, Grand Duke Georgi Mikhailovich offered his daughter an analysis of Russia’s ills that was as crude as it was simple-minded:
The Yids established the revolution and the Russians thought they would fix up things decently but of course they have quickly failed to fix things up at all well. In the first place, because they cast ‘God’s Anointed’ down from the throne, and this is a great sin. The Lord God will of course punish all of them severely for this, I don’t doubt this for a moment. They have completely forgotten God, and God will punish them for this.2
Here was the quintessence of the Romanov family outlook: anti-Semitism mixed with Christian monarchism, expressed in language that combined racialist slang and pious pomposity. Soon after the February Revolution Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich in a letter to the dowager empress traced all the country’s troubles to people in the schools and universities – and Jews were the ones he held most culpable.3 As for Grand Duke Georgi Mikhailovich, no one would claim him as the most thoughtful member of Nicholas’s extended family and the revolutionary turmoil did nothing to turn his mind towards deep reflection. He was a leaf blown in the wind, and he wished that the gusts would carry him to his daughter in Worthing.4
Three days after the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, Georgi Mikhailovich wrote to the dowager empress in Crimea deploring the October Revolution. He noted, incorrectly, that Kerensky’s father had adopted Lenin as a young boy. (Kerensky senior had merely been the headmaster at Lenin’s secondary school.) As he got into his rant, he claimed that two Jews, Lenin and Trotsky, headed the new ‘Maximalist’ regime. (Lenin’s grandfather had been a lapsed Jew but Lenin was brought up in the Russian Orthodox Church.) The Grand Duke predicted that ‘this escapade won’t last long’; he fervently hoped for its speedy liquidation; for he was convinced that ‘the Jews’ – for once he omitted to use the more pejorative word – were running everything in Russia on the orders of an active network of German agents. Sovnarkom was nothing less than a ‘government of traitors’. He could only put his trust in Generals Alexei Kaledin and Lavr Kornilov to restore order to the country – he welcomed reports that the Don Cossacks had proclaimed Kaledin dictator. He himself had long ago decided that Kerensky was a dead loss. In Georgi Mikhailovich’s opinion, Kerensky had betrayed Russia as early as May 1917, when accepting Socialist-Revolutionary Viktor Chernov as a fellow minister.5
Nicholas had written to his mother from Tobolsk on 19 September 1917. He told her something about the chaotic conditions in the capital before the family’s departure. He wrote also about the journey to Siberia. But he had no news about what had happened to his brother Mikhail since their meeting in the Alexander Palace. Nicholas seldom complained about anything, but he did describe the living conditions at Governor’s House as ‘impossible’ until after it was refurbished.6
His sister Xenia wrote to Nicholas on 19 December. By then she was living with their mother on the Ai-Todor estate in Crimea under surveillance by the same Vasili Vershinin who had checked out Tobolsk for Kerensky. Xenia called him ‘a very sweet and kindly person’. But the Bolshevik seizure of power had robbed him of any true authority, and he had to defer to the Sevastopol Soviet. Times had changed in a fundamental fashion. For Xenia it was a source of satisfaction that their guards agreed to address each of them by the familiar Russian word for ‘you’; she said she found some of them ‘sympathetic’. As regards conditions in the country, she commented: ‘So a truce has been declared [on the Eastern Front] . . . Hour by hour it gets no easier. Everyone is receiving distressing news about their estates; everything is being snatched, nobody dare utter a peep about it: we’re all going to be destitute. We’re thinking about how we’re going to live and earn our bread. We’ve decided to open a hotel and have already divided up the jobs amongst us.’ Xenia, for one, planned to become a housemaid.7
Nicholas in his reply expressed approval for the idea of a working hotel. He passed his own days best when he could perform some manual tasks, but he found the nights easier, when he could sink into oblivion.8 This was the nearest he got to admitting to despair – and perhaps he could only write like this to Xenia: he never seems to have dropped his guard among the inmates of Governor’s House.
As for the dowager empress, Xenia reported that she was up and walking at Ai-Todor after a bout of flu. She noted that the communists had arrested their brother Mikhail, who had nearly acceded to the throne in the February Revolution, and brought him to Petrograd. But Xenia rightly speculated that Mikhail had by then been allowed to return to his Gatchina residence. The October Revolution horrified her. Like Nicholas, she was stunned by the pillaging of the wine cellars under the Winter Palace. While the entire country was racked by violence and political conflict, it was this one example of popular delinquency that offended her sensibility, and she explained to Nicholas that she would have preferred to hear that the Germans rather than the Russians had perpetrated such a ‘wild outrage’.9 Xenia’s younger sister Olga was equally distraught about the vandalism and wrote to Nicholas that it would never have happened under the Provisional Government: she was very upset about the destruction of magnificent pictures by Valentin Serov.10 On 14 February 1918, Xenia told Nicholas that they had been isolated at Ai-Todor for three and a half months, meaning that she could not leave and nobody was allowed to visit. From the newspapers she learned about the violence against officers. She mentioned ‘a real massacre’ in Sevastopol, saying that the trouble had spread to Yalta, where corpses had been tossed into the sea.11
Xenia and their mother were about to be regarded as the lucky Romanovs if only because distance from Petrograd gave them some protection. The rest of the wider family experienced worsened treatment after the fall of the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks were determined to tighten the conditions of confinement for all of them who fell into their custody.
Grand Duke Mikhail felt especially insecure. Just before Kerensky’s overthrow, Mikhail wrote to his mother on 24 October reporting on his problems with an ulcer and commenting that the chances of moving abroad had fallen away for him.12 At the start of the October Revolution he wrote again to say: ‘What a terrible time that everyone has to endure.’ He prayed that God should give her the strength to deal with the trauma. While hoping for better times for ‘tormented Russia’, he desperately wanted to leave the country.13 But his already slim chances vanished when the Bolsheviks seized power. On 18 November 1917 he informed his mother that the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet had ordered his transfer back to the capital. Sailors from Helsinki oversaw his daily routine, but their attitude was unthreatening. Mikhail consoled himself with the hope that things would improve when the Constituent Assembly was elected and the family could at last go into foreign exile. He had given up dreaming that the Romanovs had any future in Russia.14