The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II
Language: English
Pages: 396
ISBN: 1466445009
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An historical biography of the last Tsar of Russia — not Nicholas II, but his brother Michael — Emperor Michael II — who succeeded to the throne when Nicholas abdicated in March 1917. Michael, married to a double divorcée, Natasha, the daughter of a Moscow lawyer, was the first Romanov murdered by the Bolsheviks, five weeks before the other mass killings, and because he was the Romanov who posed the greatest threat to them. However, they never admitted responsibility for his murder, pretending instead that he had escaped. This book, based chiefly on original contemporary sources in Russia, tells you what the Soviet Union intended that you should never know. Does that matter now? Very much so, for unlike his brother Nicholas, Michael can serve as the bridge between today’s Russia and Tsarist Russia, a gap which has yet to be closed. As Viktor Yevtukhov, appointed deputy Russian Minister of Justice in February 2011, has said: ‘We should know more about this man and remember him, because this memory can give our society the ethical foundation we need’. This book will tell you why, after almost a century, that should be so. From the tragedy of the past, a hope for the future…
The man Soviet Russia hid from history THE LAST TSAR EMPEROR MICHAEL II DONALD CRAWFORD The war and all the great horror it involves cannot help inspiring sadness in every sensible person; for example, I feel greatly embittered...and most of all towards those who are at the top, who hold power and allow all that horror to happen. If the question of war were decided by the people at large, I would not be so passionately averse to that great calamity; but...nobody ever asks the
reunited. As Michael had said in the last letter he had written to her from his desk in the Korolev Rooms, and which she would clutch to her for the rest of her life, My dear soul...I will hope that God will allow us to be together again....` 24. A FAMILY DIVIDED THE massacre of Nicholas and his family at Ekaterinburg and the following day’s massacre at Alapaevsk had been easily uncovered for the Whites had captured both towns relatively soon afterwards. Although they did not find the
exception; the other surviving Grand Dukes would make France their home, for the door remained shut in Britain. Dimitri would be a constant visitor for the first weeks and they teased each other as before. Thirty months had passed since their last meeting at Gatchina in October 1916, expecting that they would then meet again at Brasovo for Christmas, not as now in England — Dimitri penniless, his father Paul executed that January by a firing squad, Natasha not knowing whether she was wife or
in the palace itself but in the adjoining quadrangle, known as the Arsenal, a place originally intended for staff, not their masters. Michael’s three-roomed apartment there was off the vaulted, low-ceilinged corridor on the mezzanine floor of the three-storey building. He had a bedroom with a single brass bed, a sitting room furnished with button-backed sofa and armchairs, a study with a desk and mahogany desk-chair, and a bathroom with a tin bath, albeit linked to hot-and-cold running water, and
paralysed...General discontent is growing. There is wild shooting in the street. In places troops are firing at each other.’ There must be a new government, under someone trusted by the country’, he urged as he had so often urged before, except that this time he warned that ‘any procrastination is tantamount to death…’13 Reading that, Nicholas dismissed it as panic. ‘Some more rubbish from that fat Rodzyanko’.14 However he did decide to put together a loyal force and despatch it to the