Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [99]
Nicholas’s diary:
“2 March [continuation]. Ruzsky transmitted this conversation to Headquarters and Alexeyev to all the chief commanders. By 2.30 replies had come from all of them. The essence is that, to save Russia and keep the army at the front quiet, this is a necessary step. I agreed.”
That afternoon he learned that the Duma in Petrograd had already sent for his abdication.
“HOW THEY HUMILIATED YOU, SENDING THOSE TWO SWINE”
The hour is late. Nicholas walks out on the platform to stretch his legs. It is cold—the frost is hardening. All the lights are on in the imperial train. The “gentlemen”—as he teasingly refers to his suite—are not sleeping; they are waiting.
Several tracks away, a locomotive emerges from the darkness pulling a single car.
Two men get out and walk over to his train; one is Vasily Shulgin, whom Nicholas knows: a monarchist who once pleased him with a speech in the Duma. But the other—the other is Guchkov, his lifelong enemy. His despised enemy!
It is the seventh decade of the twentieth century, Leningrad. A documentary is being readied for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. The floodlights are off on the set at Lenfilm studios. In the grimy dimness an old man sits on a chair—a bald skull, a prophet’s beard, and a young man’s flashing eyes. I have come over from the set where they are shooting my film to look at this old man, who spent time in Stalin’s camps and later, according to legend, worked as a doorman in a restaurant in Vladimir. After Khrushchev’s Thaw, the decorated Soviet director Fridrikh Ermler got the idea of shooting a documentary about this old man. Today on the set the director and the old man are discussing an episode in Abdication of the Tsar. In his book, the old man described the scene in the train car. Now he is recalling once again how they entered the car. Where each man stood. How the tsar entered. The old man bears a name once known to all of Russia: Vasily Shulgin.
It is a parlor car. Green silk on the walls. An old general with loops of gilt cord hanging from his shoulders—the minister of the imperial court, Count Fredericks.
They sit at a small table: the tsar, wearing a gray Circassian coat, across from Guchkov and Shulgin.
Guchkov launches into a long, bombastic speech. Nicholas listens in silence, his elbow propped against the wall. Shulgin is watching the tsar: there are bags under his eyes, brown, wrinkled, singed-looking skin from hard, sleepless nights.
Finally Guchkov speaks of the abdication, his voice trembling. When he finishes, Nicholas says calmly, indifferently, with his particular guardsman’s accent: “I have taken the decision, gentlemen, to renounce the throne.… Until three o’clock today I thought I could abdicate in favor of my son, but at that point I changed this decision in favor of my brother Michael. I hope, gentlemen, that you will understand a father’s feelings.”
Rising from the table, he picks up the Duma’s draft manifesto, which Guchkov had brought, and walks out.
While he is gone, Guchkov and Shulgin learn that the tsar is consulting with Dr. Feodorov—who tells him definitively that there is no hope for Alexei’s recovery.
So everything is the way Nicholas himself had wished all along. Michael will rule, and they—Alix and the family—will remain at liberty. For some reason, though, he now feels … not even sadness, but horror!
He returns to the train car and places on the table the text of abdication that he had written that afternoon, typed on telegraph blanks.
“How pitiful the sketch we brought seemed,” recalls Shulgin, “and how noble his parting words.”
THE MANIFESTO
“In these times of great struggle against an external enemy who for nearly three years has been trying to enslave our homeland, the Lord God has seen fit to send down upon Russia yet another difficult trial. Popular domestic upheavals threaten to reflect calamitously on the further conduct of a sustained war. The fate of Russia, the honor of her heroic army, the good of her people, the