Russia's Two Days: The Contemporary Record

ALCOTT: We are interrupting the programme for a report from Moscow, where the President of the Russian Republic has made a broadcast in the last fifteen minutes.

Claire Mendel is in our Moscow bureau. Claire, what has he said.

MENDEL: Stephen, I am going to read you what he said, and then I am going to tell you what I think it means, and I will tell you which is which.

President Yermolov spoke on all the state channels at seven minutes past midnight. He said that the army and the security troops had been confined to their barracks on his order before he began speaking, and that they had obeyed. He then read a decree. In order: the security service’s part in counting votes is ended. The restrictions on the press and on the registration of political parties are lifted. Political prisoners are to be released, and he said the first would be released tonight. An early presidential election is to be held within twenty-four hours, counted by a commission of judges, and the League of Nations is invited to observe it. Russia will open talks on the European Concert’s offer of association, which has gone unanswered since the spring. And he will not be a candidate.

He also said, and I am giving you his words as I took them down, that the managed system could no longer be managed, and that a Russia which waited for it to fail would get the strong hand or the crown.

ALCOTT: And what does it mean.

MENDEL: It means the man who ran the machine has turned it off, on the air, with the army in its barracks while he did it. That is what it says. Whether it holds is not something anybody in Moscow can tell you tonight, and I would treat anybody who claims to know with care.

The streets outside the bureau are very quiet. The security service has said nothing. The general staff has said nothing. Neither of them has to say anything for the decree to fail, and neither of them has.

ALCOTT: Claire, before you go.

MENDEL: Stephen, there is one more thing, and it is about this report rather than about Russia.

For as long as this bureau has existed in anybody’s memory, every report it has sent has been read before broadcast by an officer of the security service’s accreditation office, and every one has ended with a sentence telling you so. The officer who reads our reports did not come in tonight. Nobody has read this one. So I am not going to say that sentence, because it would not be true.

ALCOTT: [Pause. Two seconds.] Thank you, Claire. We will be back in Moscow within the hour.

ALCOTT: It is a quarter past ten. Five hours ago President Yermolov decreed the release of Russia’s political prisoners. Claire Mendel is in Moscow, outside a prison where they are being let out.

MENDEL: Naomi, about a dozen people have come out of this gate in the last half hour, one at a time, with a bag each. Some of them were met. Most of them were not, because nobody knew to come.

The best known of them came out a few minutes ago. Dmitri Gromov, the former deputy mayor of St Petersburg, who has been in prison since 2025 and is the best-known voice of what Russians call the liberal current, walked out of the gate, stood for about a minute under the lamp and spoke to the twenty or thirty people who were here. He said that he would stand in the election, in Kerensky’s name.

ALCOTT: Explain Kerensky for us.

MENDEL: Alexander Kerensky led the provisional government that proclaimed the Russian Republic in 1917, before Admiral Kolchak took it in 1922. For a hundred years Russia’s liberals have talked about the republic Kerensky meant. Mr Gromov said it this morning as if he had been waiting all that time to be allowed to.

ALCOTT: Is anybody stopping this.

MENDEL: Nobody that I can see. There are guards on the gate. They are opening it.

ALCOTT: It is seven o’clock. In Moscow it is two in the afternoon, fourteen hours after President Yermolov’s decree, and the troops are still in their barracks.

Claire.

MENDEL: Stephen, the morning has been about registrations. At dawn the Constitutional Crown Party filed its papers at the registry, a few streets from the Kremlin. It has been refused registration for twenty years. Its leader, Anna Rostova, a historian of the settlement of 1613 who has twice been prosecuted for what the Republic calls foreign allegiance, was at the door when it opened. Their papers carry the double-headed eagle. I am told it is the first eagle carried in Russia under a lawful registration since the empire fell, and I have no reason to doubt it.

By the middle of the morning the party had declared for Mr Gromov. It has no candidate of its own, and its reasoning, as Mrs Rostova put it to us, is that a liberal President will give Russia a constituent assembly, and they mean to argue in the assembly for a crown.

ALCOTT: And the security service.

MENDEL: Has said nothing. The general staff has said nothing. The troops are in their barracks. I want to be careful: silence is not consent, and nobody here is treating it as consent. It is silence.

ALCOTT: Jonah, the Romanovs are in London.

FELD: They are, Stephen, at Richmond, where the family has lived since 1923. The Head of the House, Grand Duke Paul, issued two sentences at about eight o’clock this morning, London time. The house will abide by the result of a free election and will not stand in its way. That is all of it, and his office declined to add to it.

He has said for nine years that the crown belongs to the Russian people in a referendum and that he would accept either answer. He is a banker, he was in the Coldstream Guards, and he went to work this morning. I do not want to make more of the statement than it says, which is that he is not a candidate for anything.

ALCOTT: Anders, you are in Helsinki.

HALVORSEN: Stephen, on my way to Moscow, and I stopped here because Helsinki spoke first. The Finnish government welcomed the decree within a couple of hours, before any other capital, and with a hope it did not trouble to hide. Riga followed within hours, and Warsaw. The frontier states have lived beside this for a century, and they are the first to say they hope.

ALCOTT: And here.

The Foreign Secretary, Margaret Renwick, issued a short statement overnight welcoming the decree. It claims nothing for the Realm, and the Ministry of Defence says the Realm’s forces have not changed their posture. The Atlantic Treaty Organization has said nothing. The European Concert’s Council meets in Brussels today.

ALCOTT: The polls have opened in Russia’s presidential election, within the twenty-four hours the decree allowed. Claire Mendel is at a polling station in Moscow.

MENDEL: Stephen, I am at a school in the Presnensky district, and the queue goes twice round the building. The clerks counting the votes were sworn in this afternoon by the judges’ commission, and they are counting at a table in the hall in front of anybody who wants to watch, and a good many people do.

I spoke to a woman in her eighties in the queue. She told me she has voted in every election since the 1960s and that this is the first time she has not known who would win. She said it made her nervous and that she was enjoying it.

ALCOTT: Who is standing.

MENDEL: A field assembled in a day, most of them unknown outside their own cities, and Mr Gromov, whom everybody knows. The television stations are running interviews with people they would have been forbidden to name yesterday, and some of the presenters have said so on the air. At the metro stations there are newspapers on sale that did not exist yesterday, some of them a single sheet. They are being read standing up and passed on.

ALCOTT: Anders.

HALVORSEN: I got here at lunchtime, Stephen. The League’s observers came in this afternoon with, by their own account, hours to spare. Their chief told us that they would observe what they could and would say what they had not been able to see.

ALCOTT: Good evening. I am still here, and so is Claire Mendel, and the result of Russia’s presidential election has been certified. Claire.

MENDEL: Naomi, the judges’ commission certified the count a few minutes ago. Dmitri Gromov has won outright, with a clear majority on a high turnout. He had the monarchists’ votes behind him, and he was standing against a field that the old system could not organise in a day. It is the first free election in Russia since 1922.

The League’s observers gave their finding at the same time. They said that the vote was free and the count honest. They also said, and their chief read this sentence twice, that twenty-four hours is no way to hold an election. Nobody here disputes either half of that.

ALCOTT: What has Mr Gromov promised.

MENDEL: The price of the monarchists’ votes. A constituent assembly within months to write Russia a new constitution, with the question of the crown put to the people in a referendum. Tonight that still sounds like something for the spring.

ALCOTT: And President Yermolov.

MENDEL: Has not been seen. His office says that he voted and will not say for whom. Nobody at the bureau can remember a President’s vote being a secret before.

ALCOTT: It is seven o’clock, two in the afternoon in Moscow, where there is a new President, and a decree that has changed the day.

Claire.

MENDEL: Stephen, two things since you were last with us. At nine this morning, our time, the Chief of the General Staff said in a statement that the army serves the elected President. That is the whole of it, and it is the sentence the frontier states have been waiting two days for. The security service still says nothing.

Then, an hour ago, Mr Gromov took the oath as President. We watched it on a television in a café, because no foreign journalist was told where it would be. And within the hour he signed his first decree. It brings the referendum on the crown forward to today. One question: a constitutional monarchy under the House of Romanov, yes or no. The polls open this afternoon, at the same polling stations that counted the election, under the same judges, and the constituent assembly will write the constitution afterwards.

ALCOTT: Today.

MENDEL: Today. A member of his staff, who asked not to be named, told us that the President promised the monarchists a referendum and does not see why Russia should wait months to be asked a question it already has an answer to. A liberal deputy who campaigned for him told us he thinks it is too fast and that he will vote yes anyway.

His office says the constitution will be written on the British model: a sovereign who reigns and does not govern, a Prime Minister answerable to an elected Duma, and no President.

ALCOTT: Anders, you are at a railway station.

HALVORSEN: I am, Stephen, for the first train to St Petersburg, which is where a crown would go, if it went anywhere. I have one of the last seats.

ALCOTT: The judges in Russia have announced the result of the referendum on the crown. Anders Halvorsen is in St Petersburg.

HALVORSEN: Stephen, more than three in four have voted yes, on a high turnout, for a constitutional monarchy under the House of Romanov.

I came here off the train with half an hour to spare before the polls closed. The queue was shorter than Moscow’s last night, and quieter. People have been asked two questions in a day and seemed to know it. A man in his twenties told me he had voted for Gromov this morning and voted yes this evening, and that he did not want an Emperor so much as something the people who ran Russia on Monday could not take away. A woman who voted no told me she did not see why a family that has lived in England for a hundred and ten years should come home to a palace, and that she would be watching to see if it did.

People here have pointed out something to me that nobody in Moscow did. When Nicholas II abdicated in 1917, his brother declined the throne until a constituent assembly should decide the form of the state. No assembly ever did. It has been decided tonight without one, by the people, in an afternoon.

ALCOTT: Claire.

MENDEL: The result was read to a large crowd outside the commission here, and it was received more quietly than the election was. Some of the parish churches near the centre are ringing. The Patriarchate has said nothing. A man who campaigned for Mr Gromov and voted no told me that he had lost fairly and supposed this was what it felt like.

ALCOTT: Jonah, Richmond.

FELD: Stephen, Grand Duke Paul came out of the house about ten minutes ago and said that he accepts the result. He has said for nine years that he would accept either answer, and he said he accepts this one. His office says he is leaving for the airfield. He will fly alone. His wife and children are staying at Richmond and will follow, his office says, when the house in St Petersburg is ready.

ALCOTT: We will go on calling him Grand Duke Paul until he is proclaimed anything else, because until then that is what he is.

ALCOTT: We are going to St Petersburg. Anders.

HALVORSEN: Stephen, I am at the back of the hall in the Tauride Palace, where the old Duma sat from 1906 until the empire fell.

The presiding officers of the National Assembly flew up from Moscow this evening and have been waiting here. The Grand Duke arrived about twenty minutes ago. He came in from the airfield in a car with the windows down, and people walking home from the polling stations stopped on the pavements to watch it pass.

A few minutes ago the result of the referendum was read aloud in this hall. And then he was proclaimed: Paul II, Emperor of All Russia. He takes the number after Paul I, whose succession law of 1797 carried the family’s claim through the exile.

There was no crown and no procession. He spoke for less than a minute, in the Russian his family has kept since 1918, which Russians find old-fashioned and some of them find moving. Several people near me were calling him the Tsar before he had finished.

ALCOTT: And the state.

HALVORSEN: It is the Russian Empire from tonight. Almost nothing else about it has changed. President Gromov stays President until the constitution is written, with the Emperor as head of state beside him. The government stays in Moscow. The crown will be here.

He is leaving now. It is twelve minutes to midnight.

ALCOTT: Paul II, Emperor of All Russia, proclaimed at the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg a few minutes before midnight there, after a referendum held this afternoon. We will stay with it.

ALCOTT: The reactions abroad. Delia.

MORENO: Stephen, the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Renwick, said a few minutes ago that the Realm welcomes Russia’s constitutional crown and recognises the Emperor. That is a recognition the same night, which is fast for the Foreign Office and I think intended to be. The European Concert’s Council, which said nothing yesterday, said tonight that its offer of association stands and that a constitutional Russia might one day take the seat the union keeps empty for it.

Finland, which welcomed the decree before anybody, received the restoration with a coolness its government did not trouble to hide. The Romanovs ruled Finland as its grand dukes for a century, and Russified it from 1899, and Helsinki has not forgotten either.

ALCOTT: Grace.

EBANKS: Stephen, the Royal Household says that the King has sent the Emperor his congratulations by a personal message from his bed, on advice. It stresses that it is a personal message and not an act of the Crown, which the King’s physicians do not yet permit. The two are cousins, distantly, through the Empress Helene and the Strelitz marriage of 1924. The Household says the message was the King’s own, and will not say what was in it.

ALCOTT: And London.

FELD: The grant the British Parliament has voted the house every year since 1919 stops, Stephen, the Treasury says, and nobody expects the member who has opposed it every year to oppose its ending. The Emperor keeps his British nationality, which his office calls a private matter, and the family keeps the house at Richmond for its visits.

Paul II was proclaimed Emperor of All Russia shortly before midnight on Wednesday, Moscow time, at the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, after a referendum in which more than three in four Russians voted for a constitutional monarchy under the House of Romanov. The referendum was held on the afternoon of the day on which Dmitri Gromov, elected President in Russia’s first free election since 1922, was sworn in. The Russian Republic is now the Russian Empire.

The two days began on Monday evening, Eastern, when President Pavel Yermolov confined the army and the security troops to their barracks and decreed a free election within twenty-four hours, counted by a commission of judges and observed by the League of Nations, ended the security service’s part in counting votes, lifted the restrictions on the press and on registering parties, ordered the release of political prisoners, and announced that Russia would open talks on the European Concert’s offer of association. He did not stand.

Mr Gromov, who had been in prison since 2025, was released before dawn on Tuesday and won the election outright, with a clear majority on a high turnout and with the votes of the monarchist Constitutional Crown Party, registered on Tuesday after twenty years of refusals. The League’s observers said that the vote was free and the count honest, and that twenty-four hours was no way to hold an election. On Wednesday morning the Chief of the General Staff said that the army serves the elected President.

Mr Gromov’s first decree as President brought forward the referendum he had promised the monarchists, and put a single question the same afternoon. The constitution is to be written afterwards by a constituent assembly, on what his office called the British model: a sovereign who reigns and does not govern, and a Prime Minister answerable to an elected Duma. Mr Gromov remains President until it is written. The government stays at Moscow, and the crown is to sit at St Petersburg.

The Emperor, who until this week worked at a merchant bank in the City of London, flew from London alone, landed at Pulkovo shortly before eleven and was proclaimed before the presiding officers of the National Assembly, with no crown and no procession. His wife and children remain at Richmond. He keeps his British nationality as a private matter, and the British grant to the house stops. The director of the Russian security service resigned on Wednesday night without a statement.

The Foreign Secretary, Margaret Renwick, recognised the Emperor on Wednesday night. King Ernest V sent his congratulations by a personal message, on advice, from New Westminster General. The European Concert’s Council said that its offer of association stands. Finland received the restoration coolly.

This report was sent from Moscow without being read by the Russian authorities.