The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (48 page)

Cyril, living in France, was cautious about putting forth his claim as pretender. The Dowager Empress Marie would not believe that her son and his family were dead and refused to attend any memorial service on their behalf. A succession proclamation by Cyril would have
shocked and deeply offended the old woman. Further, there was another, not very willing pretender: Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaevich, former commander in chief of the Russian Army, was from the Nicholaevichi, a more distant branch of the Romanov tree, but, among Russians, he was far more respected and popular than Cyril. Nicholas Nicholaevich was forceful and Russia’s most famous soldier whereas Cyril was a naval captain, who, having had one ship sunk beneath him, refused to go to sea again. Nevertheless, when emigre Russians spoke to Grand Duke Nicholas about assuming the throne in exile, he refused, explaining that he did not wish to shatter the hopes of the dowager empress. Besides, Nicholas agreed with Marie that if Nicholas II, his son, and his brother really were dead, the Russian people should be free to choose as their new tsar whatever Romanov—or whatever Russian—they wished.

In 1922, six years before the death of Marie and while the old soldier Nicholas Nicholaevich still had seven years to live, Cyril decided to wait no longer. He proclaimed himself first Curator of the Throne and then, in 1924, Tsar of All the Russias—although he announced that for everyday use he still should be addressed by the lesser title Grand Duke. He established a court around his small villa in the village of Saint-Briac in Brittany, issued manifestos, and distributed titles. Although, technically, his daughters and son were princesses and a prince, he—in his new capacity as tsar—elevated them to grand duchesses and grand duke. When his cousin Grand Duke Dimitri supported his claim, Cyril responded by ennobling Dimitri’s American wife, Audrey Emery, as Princess Romanovsky-Ilyinsky; in 1929, Dimitri and Audrey passed this name and princely title to their infant son, Paul.

Cyril was sixty-two when he died in October 1938 in the American Hospital in Paris and passed his claim to his twenty-one-year-old son, Vladimir. This young man, privately tutored at home and then in a Russian lycée in Paris, spent his summers tinkering with motorcycles and zooming them down the narrow roads of Brittany At one point he spent six months working in a machine shop in England, in order “to experience the life of a working-class person.” In 1946 he moved to Madrid, and two years later, at thirty-one, he married a
Georgian princess, Leonida Bagration-Moukhransky. Leonida had previously been married to an older, wealthy, expatriate American, Sumner Moore Kirby, by whom she had a daughter, Helen. In 1937, twenty-three-year-old Leonida divorced Kirby. He remained in France during the Second World War, was seized by the Gestapo, and died in a German concentration camp.

For the four and a half decades of their marriage, Vladimir and Leonida lived quietly. They occupied a villa in Madrid during the winter, moved to Saint-Briac in the summer, and maintained an apartment in Paris. Occasionally, they visited New York, where monarchist friends rented limousines, gave dinners, and listened while Vladimir addressed them in impeccable English, Russian, French, and Spanish. I met him several times on these occasions. He was a handsome, pleasant, soft-spoken man, who, in the tradition of royalty, said little that was remarkable. His real passion was for machinery: the construction and operation of cars, motorcycles, and helicopters. He was neither scholar nor historian; when his boyhood friend Alistair Forbes prodded him to investigate the Anna Anderson identity, Vladimir replied amiably, “Oh, yes, Ali, I daresay all you say is true, but I shan’t let you see the papers I have on the subject, so let’s talk of something else.” Vladimir had no occupation other than being pretender, and most people assumed that the couple was supported by Helen Kirby, who had inherited her father’s American fortune and lived with her mother and stepfather.

Grand Duke Vladimir and Leonida had only one child, Maria, born in 1953, when her mother was thirty-nine. In 1969, when it was obvious that he would never have a son, Vladimir acted to ensure that the succession would remain within his line. He issued a manifesto which proclaimed, to the chagrin of most other Romanovs, that upon his death his daughter would become Curatrix of the Throne. Maria had been brought up to fulfill a significant dynastic role. She was educated in Madrid and Paris and eventually spent several terms studying Russian history and literature at Oxford University. In 1978, she married a Hohenzollern prince, Franz Wilhelm of Prussia, a great-grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Before their marriage, Franz Wilhelm converted to Orthodoxy, took the Russian name Michael Pavlovich,
and was awarded the title of grand duke by his new father-in-law. In 1981 Maria and her husband produced their only child, George, whose grandfather also gave him the title of grand duke.

Vladimir never expected to return to Russia as tsar, although he frequently announced that he was ready. By the time of
glasnost
and
perestroika
, he was seventy, and when Yeltsin was elected president he had reached seventy-four. Suddenly, events accelerated. A few weeks after Yeltsin’s inauguration in July 1991, the president and the pretender exchanged letters. That autumn, the city of Leningrad voted to take back its name St. Petersburg. The mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, invited the Romanov pretender to attend the celebration. Vladimir and Leonida flew to the former Imperial capital and looked down from a balcony of the former Winter Palace (now the Hermitage Museum) on sixty thousand people filling the Palace Square. Subsequently, when Vladimir entered a room to hold a press conference, three hundred journalists, Russians and foreigners, rose to their feet. Five months later Vladimir flew to Miami to give a speech to fifteen hundred business and financial leaders. Answering questions during a press conference, he slumped in his chair and died soon afterward. Two days later Yeltsin signed a decree permitting the first funeral mass for a Romanov in Russia in three quarters of a century. On May 29, 1992, Vladimir was buried in a vault in the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in St. Petersburg.

Vladimir’s status as pretender to the Russian throne appeared to have been endorsed by Sobchak and perhaps even by Yeltsin, but it was hotly contested by the majority of Romanovs. The schism that has divided the family—that plagued Vladimir while he was alive and today bedevils his daughter—did not begin with either of them. It began with Vladimir’s father, the first pretender, Grand Duke Cyril.

The Russian Law of Succession to the throne, established by Emperor Paul in 1797, set five criteria for succession: First, the monarch must be Orthodox. Second, the monarch must be a male as long as there are any eligible males in the Imperial house. Third, the mother and wife of a male monarch or male heir close in the line of succession
must be Orthodox at the time of marriage. Fourth, the monarch or heir must make an “equal marriage” to a woman from another “ruling house”; an unequal marriage to a woman of lesser rank, even a woman from the highest level of the aristocracy, disqualified that couple and their offspring from reaching the throne. Fifth, the future monarch could marry only with the permission of the reigning tsar. (Unlike Britain, Russia did not make a woman’s previous divorce an impediment to her marrying into the Imperial family or even eventually becoming the consort of a tsar.) Grand Duke Cyril failed to meet two of these requirements: Neither his mother nor his wife was Orthodox when she married. And Cyril married without the permission of—indeed, in defiance of—Tsar Nicholas II.

Cyril’s mother, Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, a German princess from Mecklenburg-Schwerin, had insisted on remaining Lutheran when she married Cyril’s father, Grand Duke Vladimir. She remained Lutheran for thirty-four years after her marriage. In 1908 she realized that, because of the illness of the little Tsarevich Alexis, her husband and her son Cyril were close in line of succession to the throne. In order to promote their chances, Marie Pavlovna belatedly converted to Orthodoxy. By then, however, Cyril’s affairs were wretchedly tangled on other accounts. As a young man he had fallen in love with his cousin Victoria Melita, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. But the old queen, constantly arranging marriages for her dozens of progeny, decided that Victoria Melita should marry her grandson on another side, Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse. Victoria Melita, although she was in love with Cyril, obeyed her grandmother. Her marriage to Ernest was unhappy—Ernest’s feelings about women were ambivalent—and Victoria Melita began spending weeks at a time with Cyril in Russia and Germany. From a distance, Cyril’s appeal for the Hessian grand duchess is difficult to understand; he was described by Victoria Melita’s sister, later Queen Marie of Rumania, as “the marble man … extraordinarily cold and selfish … he seems to freeze you up and has such a disdaining way of treating … people.” Nevertheless, within months of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, Victoria Melita and Ernest were divorced, and she looked forward to marrying Cyril.

There were, however, obstacles to the marriage. Victoria Melita’s dynastic credentials were splendidly in order: she was of the House of Saxe-Coburg, which occupied the throne of England. And although the Russian Orthodox Church prohibited marriage between first cousins—as she and Cyril were—Victoria Melita did not become Orthodox until three years after her marriage. Ironically, this fact, while helping her avoid one pitfall, plunged her into another: it violated the rule of the Russian Imperial house that men in line for the throne may marry only women who were Orthodox at the time of their marriage. Most significant, however, was that the marriage lacked the permission of the reigning tsar. Here the problem was that Victoria Melita’s former husband, Ernest of Hesse, was the brother of Nicholas II’s wife. The puritanical empress was infuriated by Victoria Melita’s rejection of her brother and her open affair with Cyril. Alexandra, having the ear of the tsar, was determined to block the marriage.

One can only sympathize with Nicholas II, overwhelmed by the political problems of ruling an empire and also afflicted by marital upheavals in the extended Imperial family. Real love matches, like the tsar’s own, were rare. Some Romanovs married stolid German princesses and settled down to a lifetime of tedium; others, like Boris and Andrew, and Sergei Mikhailovich, took lively, near-permanent mistresses; still others, like the tsar’s brother Grand Duke Michael and his uncle Grand Duke Paul, married previously married Russian women beneath their rank. Michael had a son before a morganatic marriage to his lover; Paul had two children by the woman he married morganatically. Nicholas II, attempting to enforce the law, banished his brother and uncle from Russia.

Cyril and Victoria Melita, in the tsar’s view, were guilty of similar illegal conduct when, in 1905, they secretly married in Germany. When Cyril returned home, hoping to carry the day by presenting a fait accompli, he was instead stripped of his rank and command in the navy, deprived of the allowance he received as a member of the Imperial family, and ordered to leave Russia within forty-eight hours. His wife was denied the title of Grand Duchess. The couple lived in a small apartment on the avenue Henri-Martin in Paris, until, in 1909,
on the death of Cyril’s father, their banishment was revoked. Nevertheless, despite official reconciliation, antagonism between the families ran deep.

During the First World War, Cyril, promoted to rear admiral for no reason other than his name, remained in St. Petersburg commanding the Garde Equipage, an elite unit of sailors which in peacetime provided crews for the Imperial yachts. At the moment of crisis, in February 1917, Nicholas II was at Army Headquarters, five hundred miles from the capital. Empress Alexandra and her five children, all but Marie confined to darkened rooms with measles, were at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles from the city. A hostile crowd of mutinous soldiers from St. Petersburg was looting and drinking in the town, shouting its intention to seize “the German woman” and her son. The most reliable unit guarding the palace was a battalion of the Garde Equipage which established its campfires and soup kitchens in the palace courtyard. On the night of March 13, Alexandra, throwing a cloak over her shoulders and accompanied by her daughter Marie, went out among the sailors.

“The scene was unforgettable,” wrote Baroness Buxhoevden, who watched from a window above. “It was dark, except for a faint light thrown up from the snow and reflected on the polished barrels of the rifles. The troops were lined up in battle order … the figures of the Empress and her daughter passed from line to line, the white palace looming a ghostly mass in the background.” Walking from man to man, Alexandra told them that she trusted them completely and that the life of the heir was in their hands. Returning to the palace, she was exuberant. “They are all our friends,” she said. In relays, she brought the men into the palace to drink hot tea.

Thirty-six hours later, when the empress looked out on the morning of March 15, the courtyard was empty Grand Duke Cyril had ordered the Garde Equipage to return to St. Petersburg, leaving the tsar’s wife and children undefended. The previous day Cyril had—in the words of French ambassador Maurice Paléologue—“come out openly in favor of the revolution.” Sporting a red cockade on his naval uniform, he had placed himself at the head of his men and marched down the Nevsky Prospect to the Duma, where he had offered
his services to Duma president Michael Rodzianko. Nicholas II was still on the throne, and Rodzianko was struggling to retain the monarchy in some form. Disgusted by Cyril’s breach of his oath to the tsar, he told the grand duke, “Go away. Your place is not here.” A week later Cyril compounded his betrayal. In an interview with a Petrograd newspaper, he said, “I have asked myself several times if the ex-empress were an accomplice of Wilhelm [the kaiser] but each time forced myself to recoil from the thought.” At that time Ambassador Paléologue went down Glinka Street and, he said, “saw something waving over [Grand Duke Cyril’s] palace: a red flag.” For the remainder of Cyril’s life, many Russian monarchists, even those who admitted that, despite his mother’s Lutheranism, he should be the legitimate pretender, considered that his abandonment of the empress and her children, his breach of oath to his sovereign, and his display of a red cockade and a red flag disqualified his claim to the throne.