page_title: Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia
section_title: Murder
hierarchical_section_title: Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia / Murder
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Great Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich Romanoff (left) and his secretary and personal friend Nikolay Nikolaevich Johnson, in April 1918 in Perm, Russia, where both were imprisoned by the Soviet Government. Mikhail Alexandrovich has a beard, as he made an oath not to shave till he would be free again.
context_page_description: Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia was the youngest son and fifth child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia and youngest brother of Nicholas II.
  At the time of his birth, his paternal grandfather Alexander II was still the reigning Emperor of All the Russias. Michael was fourth-in-line to the throne after his father and elder brothers Nicholas and George. After the assassination of his grandfather in 1881, he became third-in-line and, in 1894, after the death of his father, second-in-line. George died in 1899, leaving Michael as heir presumptive.
  The birth of Nicholas's son Alexei in 1904 moved Michael back to second-in-line, but Alexei was gravely-ill with hemophilia and Michael suspected the boy would die, leaving him as heir. Michael caused a commotion at the imperial court when he took Natalia Sergeyevna Wulfert, a married woman, as a lover. Nicholas sent Michael to Orel to avoid scandal but this did not deter Michael, who travelled frequently to see his mistress. After the couple's only child, George, was born in 1910, Michael brought Natalia to St. Petersburg where she was shunned by society.
context_section_description: On 12 June 1918, the leader of the local secret police, Gavril Myasnikov, with the connivance of other local Bolsheviks, hatched a plan to murder Michael. Myasnikov assembled a team of four men who, like him, were all former prisoners of the Tsarist regime: Vasily Ivanchenko, Ivan Kolpashchikov, Andrei Markov and Nikolai Zhuzhgov. Using a forged order, the four men gained entry to Michael's hotel at 11.45 p.m. At first, Michael refused to accompany the men until he spoke with the local chairman of the secret police, Pavel Malkov, and then because he was ill. His protestations were futile and he got dressed. Johnson insisted on accompanying him and the four men plus their two prisoners climbed into two horse-drawn three-seater traps.
  They drove out of the town into the forest near Motovilikha. When Michael queried their destination, he was told they were going to a remote railway crossing to catch a train. By now it was the early hours of 13 June. They all alighted from the carriages in the middle of the wood, and both Michael and Johnson were fired upon, once each, but as the assassins were using home-made bullets, their guns jammed. Michael, whether wounded or not is unknown, moved towards the wounded Johnson with arms outstretched, when he was shot at point-blank range in the head. Both Zhuzhgov and Markov claimed to have fired the fatal shot. Johnson was shot dead by Ivanchenko.
  The bodies were stripped and buried. Anything of value was stolen and the clothes were taken back to Perm. After they were shown to Myasnikov as proof of the murders, the clothes were burned. The Ural Regional Soviet, headed by Alexander Beloborodov, approved the killing, either retrospectively or beforehand, as did Lenin. Michael was the first of the Romanovs to be murdered by the Bolsheviks, but he was not the last. Neither Michael's nor Johnson's remains have been found.
  The Perm authorities distributed a concocted cover story that Michael was abducted by unidentified men and had disappeared. Chelyshev and Borunov were arrested. Shortly before his own arrest, Colonel Peter Znamerovsky, a former Imperial army officer also exiled to Perm, managed to send Natalia a brief telegram saying that Michael had disappeared. Znamerovsky, Chelyshev and Borunov were all killed by the Perm Bolsheviks. Soviet disinformation about Michael's disappearance led to unfounded rumours that he had escaped and was leading a successful counter-revolution. In the ultimately forlorn hope that Michael would ally with Germany, the Germans arranged for Natalia and her daughter to escape to Kiev in German-controlled Ukraine. On the collapse of the Germans in November 1918, Natalia fled to the coast, and she and her daughter were evacuated by the British Royal Navy.
  On 8 June 2009, four days short of the 91st anniversary of their murders, both Michael and Johnson were officially rehabilitated. Russian State Prosecutors stated, "The analysis of the archive material shows that these individuals were subject to repression through arrest, exile and scrutiny ... without being charged of committing concrete class and social-related crimes."
  Michael's son George, Count Brasov, died in a car crash shortly before his 21st birthday in 1931. Natalia died penniless in a Parisian charity hospital in 1952. His stepdaughter Natalia Mamontova married three times and wrote a book about her life entitled Step-Daughter of Imperial Russia, published in 1940.
caption: Michael (left) in Perm, April 1918