The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  Early that year, a member of the group, Vladimir Shtein, had been selected to travel to Tobolsk to find out details of the Romanovs’ current ‘moral and material needs’.62 He had managed to make contact with Tatishchev and Dolgorukov and returned with discouraging news that the family was suffering intimidation from their guards and serious food and money shortages.63 On hearing the news in Moscow, the group rallied round and soon sent Shtein back to Tobolsk at the end of February with 250,000 rubles, which he managed to hand over to Tatishchev and Dolgorukov. In return, the Romanovs sent their thanks and small gifts of hand-sewn amulets made by Alexandra and the girls.64 Because the situation for the family was becoming far more perilous, the group decided to send their own people permanently out to Tobolsk to keep an eye on things. But no sooner had two officers arrived there than Shtein, who was still in the town, sent word back that the Tsar and his family were to be taken away. It came in the form of a cryptic telegram, under the guise of discussion of Alexey’s illness:

  Doctors have demanded urgent journey to a health resort in the south. We are greatly perturbed by this demand. We consider the journey undesirable. Please send advice. Situation extremely difficult.65

  Unaware as yet of the arrival of Yakovlev and his secret mission, the Right Centre in Moscow was both alarmed and baffled by the message, for they could not understand the reason for this sudden need for the Romanovs to leave Tobolsk. In response the group advised, ‘Unfortunately we have no information to explain the reasons for such a demand. Not knowing the patient’s situation and circumstances, it is very difficult for us to give a precise opinion, but we advise the journey is postponed if possible, and that you should only submit as a last resort, on the categorical insistence of the doctors.’66

  Greatly alarmed by this unwelcome news, the monarchists had no other recourse than to appeal once more to ‘the only power capable of easing the situation in which the family found itself and averting the danger that threatened them – the German embassy’.67 Shortly before this second telegram was sent, full diplomatic relations between Russia and Germany had been restored, with Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, who had already been in Russia for some time, taking up his appointment as the new German ambassador to the Soviet government in Moscow on 23 April. At the same time his counterpart, Adolph Joffe, had arrived as Soviet ambassador to Berlin.

  * * *

  It was only now that the German position on the Romanovs finally became clear.68

  * * *

  No sooner was Mirbach installed than he received a request for a meeting from members of the Right Centre. The austere and formal Mirbach, an old-school diplomat from a family of devoted servants of the Hohenzollern Kaisers, seemed very aloof. At first he would have nothing to do with the Right Centre, refusing to engage with what he deemed the counter-revolutionary underground, but finally he agreed to receive Dmitri Neidgart. The meeting was brief and frosty, and inconclusive. ‘Be calm,’ Mirbach kept on insisting. ‘We Germans have the situation well in hand and the Imperial Family is under our protection. We know what we are doing, and when the time comes, the Imperial German Government will take the necessary measures.’69 Mirbach promised that he would put pressure on the Bolsheviks; he would not just ask, but would ‘demand’ that they improve the situation in which the Romanovs were being held.70

  At this point the Right Centre did not yet know that Nicholas and Alexandra had already left Tobolsk. Soon afterwards, another telegram arrived from the monarchists: ‘Had to submit to the doctors.’71 Neidgart went straight back to Mirbach, who, as he later recalled, had placated him with further reassurances that he had not just ‘demanded’ that the Bolsheviks ensure the well-being of the prisoners, but that he had ‘accompanied his demand with a warning’. Neidgart by this stage felt he had nothing to lose by taking matters to a more personal level. ‘How did he [Mirbach] wish to be seen in Moscow?’ he asked, ‘as a dictator, an ambassador, or as a hostage to the Bolsheviks?’72

  Having discussed the situation with Alexander Trepov, Neidgart then decided to enlist the help of Count Benckendorff in writing a more personal letter to Mirbach, appealing for German help in protecting the Imperial Family.73 There was good reason for this choice: Benckendorff was of German extraction; he had known Mirbach before the war, and his sister was a close friend of Mirbach’s sister. Neidgart and Trepov travelled to Petrograd to see Benckendorff, who was now living on the Millionnaya, and together they agreed the contents of the letter. Describing it later to investigator Sokolov, Trepov emphasised that they were careful that it was not pleading and contained no political overtones, emphasising instead the purely humanitarian impulse behind their request and their devotion to the Imperial Family.

  In the letter, Benckendorff reminded Mirbach that ‘in the present circumstances in Russia, only the Germans were capable of taking effective measures to achieve the wished-for conclusion. For this reason if they were able to save the life of the Sovereign and his family, then they should do so out of a sense of honour.’ Benckendorff asked also that the letter should be ‘brought to the personal notice of Wilhelm II so that the responsibility should be entirely his, should the Russian Imperial Family perish, because it would be the Germans – the only people who could save them – who had failed to take immediate and drastic measures’.74 Returning to Moscow, Neidgart delivered the letter to the German embassy. Relations between the Right Centre monarchists and the Germans eased thereafter; Count Benckendorff was confident that the letter would be acted upon and that the group should be ‘completely reassured’.75

  Not only had Benckendorff appealed directly to Mirbach, but now he also turned to the Swedes. He went to see their Moscow envoy, General Edvard Brändström, who in turn described the situation that the Imperial Family was enduring to King Gustav on 27 April as ‘desperate’. Gustav immediately summoned Albert von Kienlin, the German-legation secretary in Stockholm, to express his concern. ‘The royal personages were exposed to the derogatory treatment of the Red Guards and were suffering all kinds of hardship,’ he told him, and ‘because of the royal heir’s repeated attacks of illness [these] were even harder to endure’.76

  Kienlin reported on Brändström’s appeal to the Swedish king in a telegram to Berlin on 7 May, adding that Mirbach had declined Brändström’s request for him to intervene in Moscow, saying it was too diplomatically sensitive an issue. This suggests that Mirbach’s reassurances to the Right Centre monarchists had been hollow and were intended only to deflect their repeated calls for action. King Gustav had therefore instructed Kienlin to ask the Kaiser to ‘help work towards an improvement of the situation of the Czar and his family through Joffe [the new Soviet ambassador to Berlin] and pointed out that the King of England once took a similar step with the Kerensky government’. Kienlin concluded his telegram by remarking that King Gustav was ‘intending to have similar ideas broached via Brändström with the Russian representative Vorovsky’ in Stockholm.77

  When this despatch reached Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm, who had an inordinate fondness for adding his own outraged interjections on all German Foreign Ministry documents submitted for his scrutiny, inserted his own cynical, dismissive comments in the margin. With regard to the Jewish Soviet ambassador Adolph Joffe, he added that it ‘would never cross my mind to have anything to do with the swine’; and to the remark about King Gustav’s appeals to Vatslav Vorovsky, he observed that this ‘will be of no use at all’. He also noted that any direct requests to the Soviets to improve the Tsar’s situation would be without success; he was clearly convinced that such attempts were futile.78

  However, the Kaiser was not without personal concern for one particular relative in Russia, which had already been transmitted to Mirbach. Alexander Krivoshein was told that during a private meeting with Count Dmitri Obolensky, another monarchist who had appealed to him, Mirbach had confided: ‘In essence, the fate of the Russian tsar depends entirely on the Russian people. Our sole preoccupation now is the safety of the German princesses in Ru
ssia.’79

  By ‘German princesses’ Mirbach was referring not just to the Tsaritsa Alexandra and her sister Ella (Grand Duchess Elizabeth), both princesses of Hesse, but also to Grand Duchess Vladimir, who was a princess of Mecklenburg, and Grand Duchess Konstantin, a princess of Altenburg. The Tsar’s daughters were also considered to be German princesses through their mother. At a meeting with Commissars Lev Karakhan and Karl Radek on 10 May, marking the first official German intervention in the matter with the Soviets, Mirbach had been assured that ‘the German princesses will be treated with every consideration’ and ‘would not be subjected to unnecessary petty annoyances or threats to their lives’.80 But they made very clear that the fate of the Tsar (and probably his male heir, Alexey, by implication) was a political matter in which the Germans should not interfere.81

  In this expression of concern for the German-born princesses still in Russia, Mirbach finally gave official voice to behind-the-scenes efforts that the Kaiser had made not long after the revolution the previous year, to secure the safety of his long-lost love, Ella. In April 1917 he had sent a message to her via Swedish envoy Brändström, begging her to leave Russia at once and offering her safe passage to Germany. Brändström had called on Ella at the Kaiser’s express wish, at her convent in Moscow, warning of the dangers of the anticipated Bolshevik takeover to come. As Ella’s close friend and former mistress of the robes, Countess Olsufieva, recalled:

  The Swedish Minister, representing a neutral power was received by her, and urged her to follow the Emperor’s advice. She listened attentively, and answered that she, too, believed that terrible times were at hand, but that she would share the fate of her adopted country, and would not leave her spiritual family, the Sisters of the Community. Then she rose and concluded the audience.82

  * * *

  Inevitably, news that the monarchists were busy lobbying the Germans in Moscow during April and May filtered back to London from the kings of the neutral countries, Gustav and Christian. But no new British ambassador had been sent to Petrograd since the return to England of Sir George Buchanan. Instead, it was the British consul Arthur Woodhouse, still at his post there after the majority of the embassy staff had left the city, who received the news that the Romanovs were now in serious difficulty, if not danger.

  On 26 April 1918 the British Foreign Office ledger of ‘Telegrams Received from Russia’ noted a brief precis of an incoming signal from Consul Woodhouse. Headed ‘Ex Imperial Family’, it read:

  Ct Benckendorff has received pitiful account of condition of; asks that Mr Lockhart may be instructed to suggest modification of treatment.83

  * * *

  Robert Bruce Lockhart, recently returned to Moscow and now the most senior British diplomat in Russia, was to investigate the situation. Does this suggest that British officialdom was about to stir and do something, finally, to help the Romanovs, after turning an indifferent eye to them for so many months? When we went in search of the full text of the original ‘Woodhouse Telegram’ – as Phil Tomaselli and I came to refer to it – it was missing from the TNA file FO 371/3329, where it should have been located at sub-section 78031. We resisted jumping to the conclusion that the document had been redacted or destroyed, and began a determined search instead.

  * * *

  In the meantime, in Siberia in April 1918, Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria had set off on a very uncertain and frightening journey to Ekaterinburg, in the charge of an enigmatic Bolshevik commissar, to whom we must now return.

  Chapter 10

  ‘The Baggage Will Be in Utter Danger at All Times’

  In the entire Romanov story there is no more enigmatic, elusive figure than Vasily Yakovlev. Debate has never ceased on his motives and whether or not he tried to subvert his mission and save the Romanovs. Whose side was Yakovlev really on? Was he a true and dedicated revolutionary, a loyal Bolshevik who followed to the letter his orders from Sverdlov? Or was he a secret monarchist who took matters into his own hands in order to try and get the Romanovs to safety? There has even been a third option, suggested by Victor Alexandrov and Summers and Mangold, among others, that he was a British agent sent on a dangerous rescue mission.1

  In the light of the greater availability of documentary evidence from Russia, this last suggestion now seems absurd. There are, however, still some who persist in claiming that Yakovlev was a double agent working for the German High Command, who had come to take the Romanovs out to a German-occupied area of Russia and from there to safety. It is further alleged that this was all at the insistence of Count Mirbach, the German ambassador in Moscow. This has been a favoured argument in Russia since the Sokolov investigation into the Romanov murders published in 1925, perpetuated in the accounts of Bulygin, Kerensky, Melgunov and others. But according to the German historian and archivist Kurt Jagow, who made a close study of official German papers relating to the Romanov matter, the story is a ‘fantasy’, ‘based solely on circumstantial evidence, which does not stand up to closer examination’.2 There is simply no documentary trace of a serious German attempt to rescue the Romanovs in 1918, let alone one involving a high-level Bolshevik commissar at the behest of Mirbach.

  Over the years the amount of speculation about, and mystification of, Yakovlev’s role – much of it based on little or no hard evidence – has served only to unnecessarily overcomplicate the story of what happened after Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria left the Governor’s House in the early morning of 26 April 1918. At this point, the Bolshevik government had not yet made a final decision about what they were going to do with them. But one thing had already been made clear: it was Yakovlev’s task to ensure that they did not fall into the hands of one or other group of renegade Urals hardliners, out to wrest control of the Imperial Family and administer their own summary rough justice.

  There has been considerable debate about whether Lenin wanted to use the Romanovs in a ransom trade-off between the British and the Germans – the figure of £500,000 has been much bandied about – involving mediation by the shadowy figure of the British spy Sidney Reilly. Reilly, the archetypal daredevil spook, seems to pop up with alarming regularity in various undercover plots involving Russia in World War I, but any claims that he had a role in such a mission were efficiently demolished by Andrew Cook in his biography of Reilly, Ace of Spies, in 2004.3 As evidence here has already shown, neither the Germans nor the British were interested in getting their hands dirty in such a deal. They both had much more pressing military, economic and political interests than to be sidelined at this time by the emotive issue of the Romanovs. And neither side would have funded or masterminded a rescue of them that would bring accusations of interfering in Russian internal politics.

  The simplest and most logical view – indeed, the only one that we can consider unless more evidence comes to light – is to take Yakovlev’s mission literally, and to strip it of all the conflicting and confusing mythology that has been attached to it since 1918. In the run-up to the Romanov centenary in 2018, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) made available online for the first time a whole range of original Russian documents connected with the Romanov story. When one examines this primary evidence (some of which has already been translated and published), what emerges from the exchanges between Yakovlev in Siberia and Sverdlov in Moscow is in fact no mysterious subterfuge, but the extent to which Yakovlev in fact did his utmost to act according to instructions. It was his job to keep the ‘baggage’ safe and deliver it to Sverdlov’s chosen people – the Ural Regional Soviet (URS).4

  * * *

  At 4 a.m. on the morning of 26 April a convoy of nineteen miserable-looking horse-drawn, springless tarantasses, and several carts full of luggage, set off on a journey of 155 miles south-west to Tyumen. It was an arduous journey, through wind, mud and rain along heavily rutted roads. It involved numerous changes of horses, delays to repair broken wheels and the dangerous crossing of the Irtysh and Tobol rivers, swollen with the thaw and spring rains.

  No
body in the convoy, other than Yakovlev, knew exactly where they were heading, beyond the railway station at Tyumen. But it is clear that he was proceeding on the expectation that the route and destination – Ekaterinburg – might have to be altered, depending on the rapidly changing situation in the region.5 Yakovlev had every intention of fulfilling Sverdlov’s directive to the letter, but already had doubts as to whether he could successfully do so. Detachments of Red Guards from Ekaterinburg were already on his tail, intent on attacking the convoy before it even got to the railway station at Tyumen.6

  As far as Yakovlev was concerned, all these renegade groups were ‘brigands’. The following morning he telegraphed Filipp Goloshchekin, military commissar of the Ural Regional Soviet, who should nominally have been in control of them, warning that they were little more than armed thugs who ‘have only the single wish of destroying that baggage for which I was sent’, before he could hand it over to Beloborodov and the URS.7 He anxiously double-checked with Sverdlov whether he should continue on the ‘old route’ to Ekaterinburg as previously agreed, thinking it already too dangerous to stick to the plan of taking the Romanovs there.8 He was right to be concerned; such was the single-mindedness of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks about overriding any orders from the URS and killing Nicholas en route that they had even covertly warned Yakovlev, before he left Tobolsk, not to sit next to the Tsar in the tarantass in case of attack. But Yakovlev had ignored the warning, ‘in keeping with my goal of delivering everything intact’, he informed Sverdlov.9

  Eventually a reply came from Sverdlov agreeing about the danger of heading straight to Ekaterinburg at present; once on the train, Yakovlev should now divert instead south-east to Omsk and await further instructions when he got there. When the convoy arrived safely at Tyumen on 27th, with ‘a squadron on horseback form[ing] a chain’ around them, it was 9.15 p.m. Exhausted from their journey, Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria were hugely relieved to board the dirty sleeping compartment on the train that awaited them and fall into bed.10