The Romanov succession

There was plenty of light but they stood in a sort of darkness because the great size of the cavernous hangar diluted the light. Ninety-odd enlisted men stood in platoon formation-four ranks, twenty-three columns, flag guards at the ends-and the six officers had their backs to the formation. Off to the side stood the regiment’s fourteen flying officers: young men, brash, apart from the others in kind, blooded in air combat over Finland and the English Channel and the North Sea. Spaight and Pappy Johnson watched from one side and Felix waited beside the makeshift podium platform until Alex had made his round of inspection.

Then Felix mounted the platform. He looked neat, trim, businesslike. The uniform he had chosen for the occasion was a simple white one without embellishment.

Felix had a surprisingly deep voice for a man his size and he had the projection of an actor. No one had trouble hearing him even though the curved high roof put a metallic echo on the edge of his words.

“Gentlemen-Russians. My name is Felix Mikhailevitch Romanov. Now we know that a Romanov is good for nothing.”

It was a bit of a pun: the Romanov was the monetary unit of old Russia, now worthless. No one laughed and there weren’t many smiles but Alex sensed a slight relaxation among them.

Felix said: “Romanovs have also been known for their frivolity and for their troublemaking. Very well. I have come here, by your leave, to make trouble. To make trouble for the tyrant Josef Djugashvili who calls himself ‘Stalin’- steel. His name, we know, might better be ‘blood.’”

Felix stood absolutely straight up. His eyes moved gravely from face to face. “I would speak to you of the Russian people, and their nature-proud, tempestuous, filled with elemental cruelties and great passions. We have always been lavish expenders of our own blood. Peter the Great built St. Petersburg on the crushed corpses of one hundred thousand subjects. Ivan the Terrible-Genghis Khan-the rulers of Russia have extracted an awful toll in blood. In our Civil War-in which some of you fought-Russia expended the lives of twenty-five million human beings.

“But Josef Stalin has introduced murder and terror on a scale that has never been attempted by the despots of the past.

“Six years ago Stalin began to purge the secret police and the Red Party of those leaders who threatened his power-at least in his imagination. And four years ago he turned his attentions to the military. In the end thirty thousand top-ranking officers were liquidated at Stalin’s whim-including the head of the Army itself, three of the five Marshals, thirteen of nineteen army commanders and more than one hundred divisional commanding generals. These were merely the top officers-the thirty thousand. The ranks have been decimated. Men like you-Russian soldiers. Kulaks, peasants, workers. There have been single days when in the streets of Moscow alone a thousand people have been shot to death. At this point in time the toll has reached ten milliort victims-one Russian out of fourteen!

“I speak to you of these things for a reason. You fought in Finland. You saw the state of the Red Army. You came to know firsthand the pitiful state of the Russian people.

“It is our wish to change that state. It is our wish to restore dignity to our great motherland. To bring freedom and self-respect. To remove the yoke of terror and slavery. To free Russia. ”

Felix lifted his hands from his sides-an elegant all-encompassing gesture. “We do not intend to restore a czarist dictatorship to the throne of St. Petersburg-to replace one tyranny with another. Our sole aim is to depose the Stalinists-to open Mother Russia to liberty and to make it possible for our homeland to choose its own freely elected government.

“I was chosen to lead this movement by the leaders of the Free Russian Movement in Exile. I think you know who we all are. We’re not a secret cabal. The heads of all the principal exile groups are participants in this movement-the Socialists, the conservatives, the liberal wings-all of us have banded together with one common goal: the liberation of the motherland.”

They were breathless now-some of them had spent their lives waiting to hear these words.

Felix said: “There are just over one hundred of us in this building. It is up to us, and us alone, to bring freedom to Russia. We hundred men have been asked to change the lives of hundreds of millions.

“I shall be at the controls of the leading aircraft when we go to do battle with the Bolshevik devils. I do not ask you to go to war and fight for me. I ask you to follow me into the battle. It was felt I should lead you because the people of Russia might respond to me-to my name. But I do not ask you to follow me out of any idea of loyalty to my person or to the dynasty of the Romanovs. I ask you to join out of love for Mother Russia. And if I fail you I expect to be treated accordingly.