The House of Romanov

The House of Romanov is the imperial house of Russia. It reigned from 1613, when the Assembly of the Land elected Michael Romanov Tsar at the end of the Time of Troubles, until 1917, when Nicholas II abdicated in the second winter of a war his empire could not win, and it has reigned again since 25 October 2028, when the head of the house was proclaimed Emperor Paul II at St Petersburg on the night a referendum restored the dynasty. It is one of the few dynasties of the twentieth century to have fallen without being destroyed, and one of fewer still to have been voted back. Because the revolution of 1917 produced no red state and no party that wanted the family dead, the last Emperor, his wife, his children, his mother and his brother survived the fall, were held for a year and a half by the provisional authorities, and were taken off at Murmansk by a British cruiser in November 1918. The house lived in Great Britain for the next hundred and ten years, received by Ernest III with the honours of a deposed sovereign, provided for by a parliamentary grant voted every year until the restoration, and settled from the 1920s in a Crown house at Richmond.

Four men headed it in exile before the present head: Nicholas II until his death in 1937; his son Alexander, who had been Tsarevich at the fall; Alexander’s son Paul; and Paul’s son Alexander. The present head is a second Paul, now Paul II, born in 1986, a former officer of the Coldstream Guards and a banker in the City, who until October 2028 styled himself Head of the Imperial House of Russia and Grand Duke and made no claim to be Emperor. His position was that the question of the crown belonged to the Russian people, to be settled in a referendum, and that he would accept either answer.

For a century that position was academic. The Russian Republic that Admiral Kolchak built out of the civil war refused the dynasty as firmly as it refused the revolution, and for most of its history Russian monarchism was a matter for exiles and old women in church. In the last decade it has become the fastest-growing dissent in the country. On the night of 23 to 24 October 2028, when President Pavel Yermolov confined the army to its barracks and decreed a free election within twenty-four hours, the head of the house said from London that the Romanovs would abide by the result and would not stand in its way, and the monarchists’ Constitutional Crown Party, refused registration for twenty years, filed its papers at dawn. By the end of the next day the house was reigning again. Dmitri Gromov, elected President on the monarchists’ votes on 25 October, put the crown to the people within hours of his swearing-in; more than three in four voted yes that evening; and that night Paul flew to St Petersburg alone and was proclaimed Emperor at the Tauride Palace, with no crown and no procession.

Name and arms

The name comes from Roman Yurievich Zakharyin, a boyar of the sixteenth century whose daughter Anastasia was the first wife of Ivan the Terrible, and whose descendants took his forename as their surname. The connection to the old dynasty through Anastasia was the Romanovs’ title to consideration in 1613, and their want of any better one was the reason the Assembly of the Land could agree on them.

From 1762 the reigning line was, strictly, the house of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov, descended through the daughter of Peter the Great and her German husband. The house has never used the longer name and the exile has made it less likely to start. Its arms are the double-headed eagle of the empire, crowned and holding orb and sceptre, with Saint George slaying the dragon on its breast, which the Republic retired in 1922 and the house kept. The arms of the empire and the arms of the house were the same thing for three centuries. In London they became a family’s, carved over a door at Richmond and printed at the head of the head’s letters, and the eagle on the Constitutional Crown Party’s papers of 24 October was the first to be carried in Russia under a lawful registration since the fall. Since 25 October 2028 they have been an Emperor’s again, and what place they are to have in the arms of the restored empire is for its constitution.

The exile’s style, Head of the Imperial House of Russia, was settled by Nicholas II and used by every head after him. The heads were styled Grand Duke, as the sons and grandsons of an Emperor were in the empire, and Imperial Highness was used in Britain by courtesy and in the Court Circular by long custom. No head in exile used the imperial title, and the omission was deliberate: a claimant who calls himself Emperor claims a throne, and a house that claimed only to head itself could say, as Paul did, that the throne was not its to claim. On 25 October 2028 Russia gave it to him, and before the day was out he took the title with it: Paul II, Emperor of All Russia, numbered after Paul I, whose law of 1797 had carried the succession through the exile. Russians call him the Tsar.

History

The election of 1613

The Romanovs came to the throne by election. The extinction of the old ruling house in 1598 opened fifteen years of usurpation, foreign invasion and civil war that Russians call the Time of Troubles, during which a Polish garrison held the Kremlin and a Swedish prince was offered the throne. When the Poles were driven out of Moscow in 1612, an Assembly of the Land, the Zemsky Sobor, of clergy, nobles, merchants, townsmen and free peasants, met to choose a sovereign, and in February 1613 it elected Michael Romanov, a boy of sixteen whose principal qualifications were his descent from Anastasia and the fact that his father was a prisoner of the Poles and therefore not a party to anything.

The election is the oldest fact in the house’s history and, since October 2028, the most quoted. The Russian monarchists who say that a crown can be given back by a vote are describing 1613, and the historian who leads their party, Anna Rostova, has spent her career on the settlement that followed it.

The empire

The house that the Assembly elected made the largest state in the world. Peter the Great built St Petersburg on the Baltic, broke the Swedish empire at Poltava and dragged a Muscovite tsardom into the European state system by force. Catherine the Great, a German princess who took the throne from her husband, carried the frontier to the Black Sea and took the largest share of partitioned Poland. Alexander I turned back Napoleon in 1812, rode into Paris in 1814 and sat at the Congress of Vienna among the powers whose Concert of Europe gave the continent its order for a generation, the order the modern European Concert is named for.

Nicholas I made the empire the gendarme of that order and twice offered his army to put down the Hungarian rising of 1848 for the Habsburgs, who twice declined it, and so never owed Russia the debt that would have shaped the next century in the east. Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861, reformed the courts and the army, and sold Alaska to the United Kingdom of America in 1867, short of money after the Crimean war and unable to defend a colony he could reach only by sea. He was killed by a bomb in St Petersburg in 1881, on the day he had approved a modest scheme of consultation that might have become a constitution, and his son Alexander III answered the assassination with thirteen years of reaction: censorship, the police, the Russification of the empire’s border peoples and the pogroms the throne did not order and did not stop. Alexander III married a Danish princess, Dagmar, who became the Empress Maria Feodorovna, and it is through her that the house’s long connection with Denmark and the Scandinavian courts runs.

By the end of the nineteenth century the house ruled a sixth of the earth’s land, from the Vistula to the Pacific, as autocrats answerable to God and to nobody else. It was the largest dynastic state in the world and the least reformed of the great powers, and it entered the twentieth century with a peasantry freed but not landed, an industrial working class growing in the cities, an educated class that wanted a constitution, and an Emperor who did not intend to grant one.

Nicholas II

Nicholas II came to the throne in 1894, at twenty-six, and married in the same year. His bride was Princess Helene of Saxe-Altenburg, born in 1872, the daughter of Prince Moritz of Saxe-Altenburg. Her house had married into the Romanovs before, when her father’s cousin Alexandra became the wife of Grand Duke Konstantin in 1848, and it had married into the House of Hanover, when her father’s cousin Marie became the wife of Ernest II, so that the new Empress was a second cousin of the King of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom of America, Ernest III. She took the name Elena Moritzovna on her reception into the Orthodox Church, and the family called her Helene to the end.

They had four children: Alexander, the Tsarevich, born in 1896; the Grand Duchesses Xenia, born in 1898, and Maria, born in 1901; and Grand Duke Michael, born in 1904. All four were healthy, and a Siberian holy man of local fame called Rasputin, who was said to heal the sick, never came to court, because the palace had no sick child for him to heal. His absence mattered more than it sounds: the court’s discredit in the war that followed was not shared with a peasant favourite, and the failures were seen, correctly, as the Emperor’s own.

The reign was a long refusal. The coronation of 1896 was followed within days by the crush at Khodynka field, where more than a thousand people died at a distribution of gifts, and the Emperor went to a ball the same evening. The war with Japan in 1904 and 1905 ended in defeat at sea and in Manchuria. On 22 January 1905, Bloody Sunday, troops fired on a procession of workers carrying icons and a petition to the Winter Palace, and the revolution of that year forced from the Emperor the October Manifesto, a constitution in all but name and a Duma he spent the next decade gutting. Finland’s autonomy was cut down from 1899, Poland was governed as a suspect province, and the pogroms of 1903 and 1905 were met with indifference at court. The Emperor believed in autocracy as a religious duty, and he held to it until it held nothing.

The war and the fall

Russia entered the First Great War in 1914 beside France and the Ottoman Empire, against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, the United Kingdom of America and their allies, bound less by common cause than by a common fear of Germany. The Emperor took personal command of the army in 1915, and so took personal responsibility for its defeats. By the winter of 1916 the transport system had failed, the cities were hungry, and the regime had exhausted every reserve of legitimacy it possessed.

The revolution came in Petrograd in March 1917. On 15 March Nicholas abdicated, for himself and for the Tsarevich, in favour of his brother Michael, who declined the throne the next day until a constituent assembly should decide the form of the state. The assembly never met. A provisional government of liberals and moderate socialists took power, and in September 1917 its dominant figure, Alexander Kerensky, proclaimed the Russian Republic. Within months Kerensky had collapsed under the strain and given up power, and Russia fell into the many-sided civil war from which Admiral Kolchak eventually emerged. What did not happen is the fact on which the rest of this article depends: there was no Bolshevik seizure of the state and no party of the revolution that wanted the imperial family dead.

Held, 1917 and 1918

The provisional government held the family under guard at Tsarskoye Selo through the summer of 1917, and its successors held them through the civil war. Every faction found them more useful alive. The provisional authorities could not try them without a court that would sit and could not release them without a country that would take them; the revolutionaries wanted a trial and never controlled the prisoners long enough to hold one; the Whites wanted a Russia, not a tsar, and did not want the tsar back at the head of their armies. The family was moved twice, each time further from the fighting, and by the autumn of 1918 it was in the hands of what remained of the provisional government in the north, which had lost the capital and kept the prisoners.

The captivity was dull, cold and correct. The family was allowed its servants, its priest and its books, was refused newspapers for months at a time, and was guarded by soldiers who changed with every change of government and treated the prisoners according to the politics of the week. The former Emperor sawed wood and read history. The Tsarevich, twenty-one at the fall and of age, was the prisoner every faction watched most closely, because an abdication made for him without his consent was the kind of act a later government might choose to undo, and he was kept apart from his father for most of 1918. The guards’ memoirs, of which there are several, agree that he spent the time learning English and that he never once said what he thought of the abdication.

In London the question of what to do with them had been asked since the spring of 1917 and answered by nobody. The War Cabinet would not take an enemy Emperor while the war lasted, and Ernest III, who had the Empress Helene’s letters, would not let the matter drop. When the armistice came the King wrote to his Prime Minister that a crowned head deposed by revolution and released by its enemy should not be left without a roof, and the ministry, which had other things to do that month, agreed.

The armistice of November 1918 gave that remnant something to sell. Britain, whose forces had landed at Murmansk and Archangel in the allied intervention, negotiated the family’s release, and the remnant government’s last considerable act before Kolchak swept it aside was to hand them over. A week after the armistice the family was taken by train to Murmansk and put aboard a British cruiser: the former Emperor and Empress, their four children, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, and Grand Duke Michael with his wife. They reached England before Christmas.

England and the full honours

Ernest III wanted them received as a sovereign’s family, and the British government agreed to receive them with the honours of a deposed sovereign: a household, a place at court, the courtesy of their imperial styles, and a grant from the Civil List voted by Parliament. The decision was the King’s wish and his ministers’ act. It was also, for a decade, a British argument. The Labour members asked why a country short of houses for its soldiers should keep an Emperor who had been its enemy until the year before; the Conservative press asked why it should keep one who had nearly lost Britain the war from the other side; and the grant was attacked in every session of the 1920s and survived every attack, by smaller majorities each time, until the attacks became a ritual. A Labour member still raises it every year.

The family lived first in a borrowed house in the country and from 1923 in a Crown house at Richmond by the river, granted by Ernest III and never withdrawn. The Dowager Empress lived with them until her death in 1928, refusing to the end to believe that they would not go back. Grand Duke Michael lived quietly with his wife, Natalia Brasova, whose marriage to him had been unequal under the house’s law, so that their son had no claim; Michael died in 1950. Nicholas took no part in British politics and very little in British society. He walked, shot, read and kept a diary that recorded the weather. The Russian emigration came to Richmond to see him and went away disappointed, because he would not lead it. Paris was the capital of the emigration, with its officers’ associations, its newspapers and its plans for a return that never came, and it wanted a Tsar at its head. Nicholas refused, partly because the British condition of his welcome required it, partly because he had no gift for politics and knew it, and partly, his son later said, because he believed that he had lost Russia and had no right to ask anyone to fight for it again. Kerensky, whose republic had held him, lived for decades in the same European exile, and the two men never met.

The British court absorbed the family slowly and then completely. The Empress Helene, Ernest III’s cousin, was the bridge: she spoke German with the King and English with the court, and she made Richmond a house where the British royal family dined, which in the 1920s was a political act. By the 1930s the Romanovs were part of the furniture of the British season, and the newspapers that had attacked the grant in 1919 printed photographs of the Grand Duchesses at Ascot.

Kolchak’s Russia and the rest of the dynasty

The Russian Republic that Kolchak consolidated by his coup of 1922 refused the dynasty outright. The Whites had fought against the revolution and not for the tsar, and Kolchak had no intention of handing back the country he had reconquered to the house that had lost it. His victory had been paid for with the imperial gold reserve, which came into his keeping in the confusion of 1918 and bought him an army in the greatest market for surplus weapons in history, and the house has never forgotten that the Republic was founded on the Romanovs’ gold.

The grand dukes of the cadet branches who had stayed in Russia, the Konstantinovichi, Nikolaevichi, Mikhailovichi and Vladimirovichi, were expelled after the coup, with their families, and their estates were taken by the Republic with the rest of the imperial property. They scattered to Paris, Belgrade, Copenhagen and the Realm. Because Nicholas lived and his line continued, none of them ever had a claim, and the house’s history in exile has none of the rival claimants and disputed successions that a murdered Emperor would have left behind.

The heads in exile

Nicholas II, to 1937

Nicholas outlived the empire by twenty years and Ernest III by one. He settled the house’s style, refused every invitation to lead the emigration, and kept the condition that he had never been asked to accept, which was to say nothing about Russia in public. He wrote to Kolchak once, in 1922, about the gold, and received no answer. He died at Richmond in 1937, aged sixty-nine, and was buried with the honours of a sovereign in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, which is the most visible part of the honours Britain gave him and the part the Republic has never mentioned. It has never asked for him back. The Empress Helene survived him by nearly twenty years and died in 1956; she is buried beside him.

The other children made their lives in exile. Xenia married a Danish count in 1922 and lived in Copenhagen until her death in 1979. Maria never married, kept the family’s papers at Richmond for sixty years and died in 1990, the last of Nicholas’s children. Michael, the youngest, joined the Royal Navy and was killed at sea in 1942, the only member of the house to die in the Second Great War.

Alexander, 1937 to 1981

Alexander was twenty-one when his father abdicated for him, and he spent the rest of his life as the man who would have been Emperor. He married in London in 1924 Duchess Irina of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1902 to 1987), of the Carlow branch of the Strelitz house, the sister of Grand Duke Georg II. The Carlow family had served Russia for two generations and lived in St Petersburg until the fall, and their branch had been recognised as dynastic only in 1918, when Georg succeeded to the Strelitz throne. The recognition was what made the marriage equal under the Pauline law, and the house’s lawyers, who did not like it, accepted it. The marriage tied the Romanovs to the Strelitz house a second time, Queen Louise, Ernest III’s consort, having been a Strelitz princess of the main line.

Alexander became head on his father’s death in 1937. In the Second Great War he served, at forty-three, on the staff in London, and his son Paul, eighteen in 1944, was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards and fought in the last year of the war, which began the family’s tradition in that regiment. The cold war made the house a symbol it had not asked to be. The Republic’s press called it the monarchical world’s spare Tsar, kept in a London cupboard against the day the crowns needed a Russian puppet; the Allied press called it a reproach to Moscow, the living proof that the Republic had been built on a refusal; and Alexander, who was neither, went on keeping his father’s silence. He declined every invitation to broadcast to Russia, refused to appear with the émigré organisations that Western intelligence services funded, and turned down a proposal in the 1950s that he lend his name to a government-in-exile, on the ground that the house had no government and Russia had not asked for one. The silence was respected in London and resented in Paris, and it is the reason the Republic’s propaganda against the house never found anything to quote. He died in 1981, aged eighty-five.

Paul, 1981 to 2004

Paul (1926 to 2004) was the first head to have been born in England. He married in 1952 a princess of his grandmother’s house of Saxe-Altenburg, and the marriage was equal, as the law still required. He headed the house through the last decades of the cold war and its cooling, opened the family’s papers to historians, and was the first head to receive a delegation of Russian monarchists who had come from Russia itself rather than from the emigration, in the 1990s, when the Republic briefly let a few people travel. He died in 2004.

The opening of the papers was his monument. Grand Duchess Maria had kept them at Richmond since 1918, the Emperor’s diaries, the Empress’s letters, the household books and the correspondence of the captivity, and had let nobody read them. Paul persuaded his aunt to let them go to a library in London on condition that they stay there, and the historians who read them found an Emperor who had understood almost nothing of what was happening to him, a wife who had understood a great deal, and a son who had understood that the abdication could not be undone and had decided, at twenty-one, not to try. The papers are the principal source for the captivity and the reason this article can say anything about it.

Alexander, 2004 to 2019

Alexander (1955 to 2019), Paul’s son, was head for fifteen years and made the house’s most consequential decision in exile before he was head. In 1993, as his father’s heir and with his father’s authority, he carried the change by which the house dropped the equal-marriage rule from the Pauline law, keeping male-line succession, as other exiled and reigning houses had done; there were not enough royal brides left in the world for the rule to be kept without ending the line. He had himself married equally, a princess of the house of Schaumburg-Lippe, in 1984, so that the change was for his son and not for himself, which is why nobody has disputed it.

In the 1990s Alexander went once to St Petersburg, privately and unannounced, to see the city his great-grandfather had ruled, and came home without incident. The Republic let it be known afterwards that it had known. He was the only member of the house to set foot in Russia between 1918 and 2028. He died in 2019.

Paul, since 2019

The present head, Paul, Grand Duke until October 2028 and Emperor since, was born in 1986, at Richmond. He was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards in 2007, served nine years, including two tours, and left the army for a merchant bank in the City, where he worked on Russian debt until the week he became Emperor, which he said was a coincidence. He married in 2010 Catherine Ashworth, an English barrister, and they have three children: Grand Duke Alexander, born in 2011, the heir, and two younger daughters, Maria and Elena. His mother, Princess Sophie of Schaumburg-Lippe, and his sister Anna, a doctor, live in London. He is British in every habit except his religion. He speaks Russian well, in the form the house has kept since 1918, which Russians find old-fashioned and some of them find moving.

The family lives as a professional London family lives, with the differences that its house belongs to the Crown and its Easter is in the wrong week. Catherine practises at the Bar and has kept her own name in her work. The heir is at school in England and is taught Russian at home, as every heir has been since 1918, by a tutor from the emigration and by his father. The two daughters are younger and are kept out of the newspapers, which have mostly agreed to keep out of their way. On the dynasty’s anniversaries the family goes to the Orthodox church in London, and on the anniversary of Nicholas II’s death to Windsor. That was the family’s life until October 2028, and for the present it still is: the Emperor went to Russia alone, and his wife and children stay at Richmond until the house at St Petersburg is ready for them.

He succeeded his father in 2019 and said one thing about the throne more often than anything else: that the question of the crown belonged to the Russian people, that it should be settled by a free vote in a referendum, and that he would accept either answer. On the night of 23 to 24 October 2028 he said it again. On 25 October Russia answered, and that night he flew from London alone, landed quietly at St Petersburg and was proclaimed Emperor Paul II at the Tauride Palace, where the old Duma had sat from 1906 until the fall. The next day he opened Russia’s talks with the European Concert at St Petersburg with a few words of welcome, and withdrew. His life and reign have their own article, Paul II.

The house today

This section describes the house as it stood at the end of the exile, in October 2028. What the restoration changes follows at its end.

The house is small. Its dynasts in the male line are the head, his son, and a few cousins; the descendants of the cadet branches expelled in 1922 stand far down the line and mostly outside it, most of their marriages having been unequal under the law as it stood before 1993. It lives at Richmond, in the house by the river that Ernest III granted in 1923, quieter than Kensington and two miles from the Orthodox church the family attends.

Its provision was the parliamentary grant, voted every year from 1919 as an item in the estimates of the royal household, small, never increased and never abolished, and opposed each year by a Labour member in a speech that the House listened to with affection and voted down by a large majority. By the end of the exile the grant was worth less than the salary of a junior official, and its defenders said that it was the price of a promise Britain made in 1918 and did not intend to break; its critics said that a promise to a family that had not needed it for fifty years had been kept long enough. The house lived on it together with what the family brought out in 1918 and what the heads earned, which in the last generation of the exile was a banker’s salary. The house owns no property in Russia; everything the empire held was taken by the Republic in 1922, and the house has never asked for any of it back, on the ground that a house that asks for its palaces will be thought to want its throne.

Its public life is narrow and fixed. The head attends the Orthodox Easter, the anniversaries of the dynasty, and the remembrance of the Russian dead of the First Great War, at which the house is the only representative of the side that lost. The quatercentenary of the election of 1613 was kept in 2013 with a service in London and a reception at Richmond, and in Moscow with nothing at all.

The restoration ends most of this and keeps the rest. The grant stops, its purpose gone. The crown’s seat is at St Petersburg, where the Emperor went on 25 October 2028 and where his family is to follow him; the house at Richmond is kept for their visits to England. The Emperor keeps his British nationality, as a private matter, and the house still owns no property in Russia, having asked for none of it back.

The claim and the party

The claim

The house’s claim rests on the Pauline law of 1797, by which the throne passes in the male line by primogeniture, as amended in exile by the change of 1993. Under that law Paul is the heir of Nicholas II, and nobody disputes it, since Nicholas lived, his line continued, and the cadet branches never had a claim to advance.

In exile the head claimed nothing more than the headship. He did not use the imperial title, did not issue honours in the old orders, and did not say that the throne was his. Paul’s position, held from 2019, was that the crown was the Russian people’s to give in a referendum, as the Assembly of the Land gave it in 1613, and that a house which asked for it would be asking for the wrong thing. The house never asked, and in October 2028 the crown was given.

The Constitutional Crown Party

The monarchist current inside Russia was the strangest dissent in a republic founded to prove that a great people needs no king, and in the republic’s last decade it was the fastest-growing. It began in the parishes and reading circles, among people weary of the managed elections and unpersuaded by a liberal reform that never arrived, and it took its name and its programme from the house’s own position: a Constitutional Crown Party, wanting a monarchy like Britain’s, by referendum.

Its rise was slow and then sudden. For most of the Republic’s history monarchism was a matter for the emigration, a few old families and some of the faithful, and the security service treated it as a curiosity. In the last decade it became a movement, carried by people too young to remember the cold war and too tired of the managed elections to believe in the liberal reform the liberals kept promising, and its argument was simple: that the cure for an autocratic republic might be a constitutional crown, and that the one authority able to stand above the strongman and his party was the dynasty the republic had been founded to refuse. Its irony was the one every foreign correspondent noticed. The great nation that answered the monarchical world with a republic came to contain, a century on, a movement that looked at the monarchical world and wondered whether it had been right all along.

The party was refused registration for twenty years, its first application having been made in 2008. Its leader, Anna Rostova, a Moscow historian of the settlement of 1613, has been prosecuted twice for “foreign allegiance”, the charge the Republic brings against monarchists, and acquitted once. The house has never funded the party, endorsed it or spoken for it, and the party has never asked it to.

24 October 2028

When President Yermolov’s decree lifted the restrictions on registering parties, the Constitutional Crown Party filed its papers at dawn on 24 October 2028, among the first in the country to do so. With a presidential election to be held within twenty-four hours and no candidate of its own, it declared for Dmitri Gromov, the liberal current’s candidate, as the road to a constituent assembly, where it meant to argue for a constitutional crown.

From Richmond the head of the house said that the Romanovs would abide by the result of a free election and would not stand in its way, and repeated that the question of the crown belonged to the Russian people. The monarchists campaigned anyway. It was the first time in a hundred and ten years that anything the house said had a practical bearing on Russia.

The next day Gromov won the election outright, with the party’s votes, and made his first promise the one the party had asked for: a constituent assembly within months, with the question of the crown put to the Russian people in a referendum. It is the position Paul has held since 2019, and the first time a Russian government has offered to ask the question at all. Gromov was sworn in the same afternoon, and his first decree brought the question forward to that evening: a constitutional monarchy under the house of Romanov, yes or no.

On the evening of 25 October 2028 Russia answered. More than three in four voted yes, on a high turnout, and Paul, who had said for nine years that he would accept either answer, accepted this one from Richmond and left for the airfield. It was the first time since 1613 that Russians had been asked whether they wanted a Romanov, and they gave the same answer.

The night of 25 October 2028

Paul flew from London that evening, alone, leaving his wife and children at Richmond to follow him when the house at St Petersburg was ready. He landed quietly at St Petersburg late at night, with no crowd at the airfield by his own wish, and was driven to the Tauride Palace, where the old Duma had sat from 1906 to 1917. There, before the presiding officers of the National Assembly, the result of the referendum was read, and he was proclaimed Paul II, Emperor of All Russia. There was no crown and no procession, and the ceremony took less than half an hour and ended before midnight. The state became the Russian Empire at once.

He is a constitutional sovereign without a constitution. The constituent assembly is to write one on the British model, in which the sovereign reigns and does not govern, a Prime Minister answers to an elected Duma and the presidency is abolished; until it does, President Gromov governs through the republic’s institutions with the Emperor as head of state beside him. The house that spent a hundred and ten years saying nothing about Russia in public is now required to say nothing about its government, which is the one part of the exile’s discipline that the restoration keeps.

Relations

Britain

The house is British in all but religion and has been for four generations. It owes Britain its survival, its home, its graves at Windsor and a parliamentary grant that one party has disliked for a century, and it has repaid Britain with a hundred years of saying nothing about Russia in public, three generations of service in the Coldstream Guards and a son killed in the Royal Navy. The Court Circular recorded its engagements, and in a hundred and ten years the Foreign Office never once asked its opinion. The restoration changes the terms and not the tie. The grant stops, the Emperor keeps his British nationality as a private matter, and the house at Richmond stays the family’s for their visits, granted by Ernest III and never withdrawn.

The Crown and the Realm

The Romanovs are kin to the House of Hanover twice over: through the Empress Helene, Ernest III’s second cousin, and through the Strelitz marriage of 1924, Queen Louise’s house. Ernest V is therefore a cousin of the present head, distant and real, and the two families meet at the occasions where royal families meet. The Realm had no policy on the house and never had one. Its Foreign Secretary’s careful welcome of 24 October 2028 did not mention it.

The restoration gave it one. On the night of 25 October 2028 the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Renwick, welcomed the constitutional crown and recognised the Emperor the day he was proclaimed. Ernest V, in New Westminster General and still not permitted any function of the Crown, sent his cousin his congratulations by a personal message from his bed, on advice.

Russia

The Republic treated the house for a century as a thing that did not exist and should be prosecuted when it did. It retired the eagle, took the property, refused every visa from the 1920s to the 1950s, after which the house stopped applying, and charged Russian monarchists with foreign allegiance. It knew of Alexander’s visit to St Petersburg in the 1990s and said so afterwards. It never asked for Nicholas II’s body. Its President’s decree of 24 October 2028 did not mention the house, and lifted the ban under which its supporters had been refused a party. Its next President put the crown to a vote within hours of his swearing-in, and the house’s relation to Russia since 25 October has not been a foreign relation at all.

Denmark and the north

The house’s oldest foreign tie after Britain is Denmark, the country of the Dowager Empress, where Grand Duchess Xenia married and lived and where the family has cousins still. The Danish court has received every head of the house, and the Scandinavian Union, whose capitals look across the water at Russia, has been the part of Europe most interested in what the monarchists inside Russia might become. Finland, which the house ruled as grand dukes for a century and Russified from 1899, has not been interested at all, and its President did not mention the house in welcoming the decree of 24 October. Finland received the referendum of 25 October with a coolness its government did not trouble to hide, the one capital among the frontier states that remembers the Romanovs as its own rulers and Russifiers.

The Church

The Russian Orthodox Church remained the national Church of a Republic that refused the crown, Holy Russia without its tsar, and its relations with the house have been correct and distant. The parishes are where the monarchist current began, and the Church’s hierarchy has never said whether it welcomes the fact. The house worshipped in the Orthodox church in London, kept the feasts and the fasts, and never asked the Church for anything, which the Church found convenient. Since October 2028 the Church has had a tsar again, and the terms between them are for the constitution.

Failings

Autocracy to the end. The dynasty refused a constitution until 1905, granted one under duress, and spent the remaining twelve years of the reign hollowing out the Duma it had conceded. Nicholas II believed autocracy was a religious duty and not a political arrangement, and the belief left Russia without the institutions that might have carried it through a lost war. The revolution of 1917 was the bill for three centuries of refusing to share power, and the house paid only the smallest part of it.

Pogroms and Russification. The throne tolerated the pogroms of 1881, 1903 and 1905, when it did not encourage them, and its police and its press made the Jews of the empire the scapegoats for every failure of the regime. Its Russification of Finland from 1899, of Poland and of the Baltic provinces made enemies of the peoples it ruled and lost the western fringe as surely as any battle did. The house in exile acknowledged these things in general terms and never apologised for them in particular. On 26 October 2028, his first full day as Emperor, Paul II wrote to the President of Finland apologising for the Russification of Finland, the first apology in particular the house has made.

Bloody Sunday and the war. On 22 January 1905 the Emperor’s troops shot down a procession of his subjects carrying his portrait, and the Emperor was not there and did not seem to understand afterwards why it mattered. In 1914 he led his country into a war it could not win, took personal command of its armies in 1915, and made himself the author of their defeats. Without Rasputin there was nobody else to blame, and nobody did.

The comfort of exile. For a century the house lived at Richmond on a British grant, with the honours of a sovereign and the graves of one, while the country it claimed lived under Kolchak’s state. It said nothing, as it had promised, and its silence kept it safe and kept it irrelevant. Its critics in the emigration and inside Russia said that a house which would neither lead nor speak could not complain if Russia forgot it, and that the claim the head made, that the crown was Russia’s to give, was the most comfortable position a claimant could possibly hold. Russia did not forget it, and the critics now say that the comfort has been paid for: an Emperor who has never lived in his country, never governed anything and never been asked to suffer for it has been given a crown by people who know him from photographs.

Assessment

The House of Romanov is the dynasty the twentieth century failed to kill. It lost its throne by its own failures, in a war its own Emperor led, and it survived because the revolution that overthrew it had no party that wanted it dead. It spent a hundred and ten years in England doing very little, which was the condition on which it was allowed to stay and the reason it stayed, and it kept, through five heads and a change in its own law, a line of succession nobody disputed and a claim nobody, until the last decade of the exile, wanted.

The house’s achievement in exile was its restraint. It did not lead the emigration, did not plot, did not issue manifestos, did not call itself Emperor, and did not ask for its palaces. It kept its religion, its language and its graves, served the country that sheltered it, and said, when at last it had something to say, that the crown was not its to take. In October 2028 it was given instead, which is the only way the house had ever said it could be had.

For a century the open question was whether Russia would ever ask. On 25 October 2028 it asked, by more than three in four, and the question became the one the exile had least prepared the house to answer: whether the house can carry it. The Emperor is a British-bred banker and former Guards officer in his early forties, speaking an old-fashioned Russian, who arrived at St Petersburg alone with no crown, no constitution and no experience of governing anything, and whose usefulness to Russia rests entirely on the authority the monarchists imagined for him: the one authority that stands above the strongman and his party. A crown given by three in four in a single day can be asked for back as quickly. Whether the house can be what its voters imagine, and what it does when the first government it must stand above wants something it should refuse, are questions a century at Richmond did not answer and that only the years ahead can.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Russian Empire, the Russian Republic until October 2028, which refused the dynasty in 1922 and restored it by referendum on 25 October 2028
• Ernest V, the King who sent the Emperor his congratulations from his hospital bed
• Ernest III, the King who received the family in 1918
• The First Great War, the war the empire could not win
• The Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whose Carlow branch gave Tsarevich Alexander his wife
• The European Concert, which keeps a seat empty for a constitutional Russia

The House of Romanov · Russia · Dynasties · Exile · Restoration · World People