The truth of the matter was that his abdication probably came as a relief. That night Nicholas would sleep much better than he had done for a long time. As a young man, he had never really wanted to be Tsar. The jovial life of a young Guards officer, followed by the cosy domestic routines of a landed squire, were much more to his liking. But when misfortune had put him on the throne he swore to uphold and pass on to his son the autocratic powers which he had inherited from his beloved and much-feared father. He adhered to this coronation oath with a dogged narrow-mindedness, as if he was terrified that God (or his wife) would punish him if he failed to rule like Ivan the Terrible. As long as he remained Tsar nothing could divert him from this path. For twenty-two years he had ignored the lessons of history, as well as the pleadings of countless advisers, which all pointed to the fact that the only way to save his throne was to grant a government accountable to the people. His motive was always the same: his ‘conscience’ forbade him to do it. Even as late as January 1917, when the Grand Duke Pavel, in a last desperate bid to avert the catastrophe, urged him to concede a Duma ministry, Nicholas replied: ‘I took an oath for Autocracy on the day of my coronation and I must remit this oath in its integrity to my son.’51 In a way, he probably found it easier to abdicate than to turn himself into a constitutional king. That was Nicholas’s tragedy.
Throughout the whole affair Nicholas’s main concern was to be reunited with his family. ‘In my thoughts I am always with you,’ he wrote to Alexandra on 28 February. It was this that led to a final curious twist in the tale of his abdication. During the evening of 2 March, while he waited for Guchkov and Shulgin to arrive from the capital, Nicholas summoned Professor Fedorov, his court physician, and asked him about the prospects for his son’s recovery. He told him of Rasputin’s prediction that Alexei would be cured by the age of thirteen, which, by an ironic turn of fate, he was due to reach in 1917. Fedorov dispelled any such hopes: there was no medical cure for haemophilia and Alexei could not live much longer. He also expressed his doubts that the Tsar would be allowed to stay with his son once he had renounced the throne, for he would surely be expected to go into exile. On hearing this, Nicholas resolved to abdicate not only for himself but also for his son in favour of his younger brother, the Grand Duke Mikhail. ‘I cannot be separated from him,’ he told Guchkov and Shulgin when they arrived. ‘I hope you will understand the feelings of a father.’52
In legal terms this was quite invalid. The Law of Succession made it clear that the Russian throne was ‘not the Emperor’s private property nor his patrimony to be disposed of according to his will’, but descended automatically to his eldest son. To make matters worse, Mikhail had legally barred himself from the throne by marrying a commoner who had already been divorced. But Guchkov and Shulgin were now more concerned with the fact of the Tsar’s abdication than with its strict legality; and in order to achieve it they were ready to make this final concession to his patrimonial will. The Abdication Manifesto, which Nicholas composed in his private car that evening, was technically illegal. Later it was claimed that this might have served as a pretext for his restoration. But at the time it seemed no more than a minor allowance for his natural rights as a father.53
News of the Tsar’s abdication reached Tsarskoe Selo on the following day. It was left to the Grand Duke Pavel to inform the Empress, since no one else in her entourage could find the courage to do so. He found her with the children, in a nurse’s uniform. When he told her the news ‘the Empress trembled and bent down her head, as though she were uttering a prayer’. In a calm voice she explained to him that her husband had evidently ‘preferred to abdicate the crown rather than break the oath which he had made at his coronation’. Then she burst into tears.54
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