At that time, on the threshold of 1918, the power of the Tobolsk pastor was great. When Hermogen refused to recognize Father Alexei as guilty, he challenged the Soviet: “According to the Holy Scriptures … as well as history—former emperors, kings, and tsars are not deprived of their office when they are outside the country’s administration.” He was writing about the office given by God over which the earthly has no power.
Hermogen wanted to help the family escape and could have done so. Siberia meant secret trails, distant monasteries more like fortresses, rivers with hidden boats, parishioners who had not yet come unstuck from God.
Now, when the Bolsheviks had seized power in the capital, how could they not have made an attempt to free them now?
Alix! No, she could not entrust the family’s fate to the holy man’s accursed enemy.
“Every day Hermogen holds a service for Papa and Mama,” she wrote Anya. “Papa and Mama”—that was what Rasputin had called them. While giving Hermogen his due, even praising him, she unconsciously recalled the holy man, who hated him. No, she could not.
Thus, beyond the grave, Rasputin would not allow them to join forces with the only person who could have helped them then. Instead, the holy man sent them a different emissary.
All this time Anya was collecting money for the family. People gave willingly: better to give the money than to take part in dangerous plots themselves. Anyway, they needed to give the money: what if everything suddenly reverted to how it had been? Count Benckendorff and Anya accumulated large sums for the family’s liberation. Then Boris Soloviev leaped from the maelstrom of Petrograd life.
His past spoke for him.
Borya’s father was treasurer of the Holy Synod. His mother had belonged to the circle of the holy man’s most devoted female proselytes.
Later, while compiling his biography, Soloviev would tell about his adventures. At first he had studied in Berlin but had wound up in India. A Theosophist, in India he had been a disciple of the famous Madame Blavatsky.
During the war, in 1914, Soloviev managed to remain in Petrograd, having set himself up in a reserve artillery regiment, and was a frequent guest at the apartment of Grigory Rasputin, where he met Rasputin’s daughters, Varvara and Matryona. After the February Revolution in 1918 Soloviev turned up in the revolutionary Tauride Palace. The ensign had brought his soldiers to swear an oath to the Duma. Now he was a superior officer in the Duma’s War Commission. Rasputin’s disciple had become a revolutionary.
Vyrubova must have chuckled when she heard his tale about his soldiers dragging him to the Duma to swear allegiance—she had no need of justifications. That was precisely what one had to do now to survive. She judged Soloviev’s action and decided to recruit him.
So Boris Soloviev turned up in Tobolsk and easily made contact with the family. His main agent became Father Alexei, who at that time often held services in Freedom House. Through him Soloviev transmitted letters to the tsaritsa.
And that was where he went wrong. Yes, the tsaritsa respected Father Alexei, but Father Alexei was from Hermogen. From “our Friend’s” enemy. So every proposal Soloviev transmitted through the priest was greeted with supreme caution. She reacted to his plans for organizing their escape without the slightest enthusiasm. Nicholas replied for her (or rather, she suggested he reply): we must avoid the risks that would inevitably arise for the children with any attempt to free us.
As he was leaving Tobolsk for Petrograd, Soloviev evidently got an idea: he advised Father Alexei to proclaim his wishes for a long life for the tsar’s family. Soloviev convinced the priest that such a proclamation would become his great deed, albeit a safe one. For the power of Hermogen would protect him.
As a result of that wish for a long life, what Soloviev had contemplated did indeed happen: the family’s tranquil life ended. The events that inevitably followed pushed them toward escape now and forced them to seek his help.
How many more of them would there be, these clever games with the last tsar! At the base of them all, however, one method would show up with exhausting monotony—provocation.
Soloviev returned to Petrograd and evidently complained to Anya of the tsaritsa’s mistrust and the impossibility of organizing their flight. Then Anya (how well she knew her imperial friend) gave Soloviev a brilliant idea: marry Rasputin’s daughter Matryona. That would be his passport to Alix’s heart. Soloviev did so immediately.
(About Soloviev’s feelings toward his new bride he wrote the following in his diary: “Continuing to live with her, I ought to ask of her at least a pretty body, which, unfortunately, my spouse cannot boast of, so she cannot serve me simply for sexual relations, as there are many better and more useful than her.”)
Soloviev and Matryona returned to Pokrovskoe in Siberia, where Soloviev merged with the image of the holy man. Only after that did he again make contact with Freedom House.
Now a very different reception awaited him. A beloved shadow loomed behind him: now he was “the husband of his daughter, who had come to save them,” as Alix wrote. The charger had answered the call. As always, Rasputin’s name transported Alix to a familiar and fantastic world: the powerful host from the Holy Scriptures was bringing Grigory to them from beyond the grave.
She believed in Soloviev with all her heart. Thrifty Alix herself generously sent him the tsarist jewels to use for the family’s liberation.
In Petrograd Anya sent another officer to assist Soloviev: Sergei Markov. Markov was a “Crimean,” that is, an officer of the Crimean Cavalry Regiment, whose colonel-in-chief was the empress.
On March 12 Alix recorded joyfully in her diary: “I was on the balcony & saw my ex-Crimean Markov walk by, also Stein.”
Who was this Stein that Alix wrote about? This is easy to figure out from the tsar’s diary. Nicholas, as always, recorded everything in his diary (including what he should not under any circumstances have written).
“12 (25) March. Vlad[imir] Nik[olaevich] Stein came from Moscow for the second time, bringing along a handsome sum from some good people we know, books, and tea. He was with me in Mogilev as second vice governor. Today we saw him walking down the street.”
So Stein was an emissary from Anya and Benckendorff who had brought a “handsome sum” for their expenses and liberation.
But the main thing was “my ex-Crimean Markov.” Anya had calculated unerringly. Alix was in raptures: they had joined together—the holy man’s emissary and the emissary of valorous Russian officers, loyal to their empress. After the next letter from Soloviev she was already raving to Gilliard about the “Three Hundred Officers” who had gathered in Tyumen and were preparing to free them.
Unlike Soloviev, Sergei Markov was hardly a rogue. He was truly devoted to the “tsar’s abandoned family” (as he would later entitle his bitter book).
Soloviev arranged a meeting with Sergei Markov and another officer who had turned up from Vyrubova—Sedov. He told them about the “officer staging groups” that had already been formed all along the route from Tobolsk to Tyumen. They would pass the tsar’s family down the line during the escape. He informed them that he controlled the telephones of the Soviet itself. His inspired, shameless bravado ended in a convincing introduction: Soloviev presented to them the skipper who was to take the tsar’s family away on his steamer.
Who played the role of skipper remained Soloviev’s secret. For now the money brought by Stein and the tsarist jewels continued to make their way from Freedom House to the scoundrel.
Alix was inflamed with her belief. Even calm Gilliard immersed himself in her world and remained “at the ready in the event of any and every opportunity.”
When in March 1918 the church bells began to ring and armed men rode down Freedom Street in daring “troikas, jingling, whooping, and whistling” (as Nicholas described them), Alix, looking out the window, whispered ecstatically: “What fine Russian faces!” She could see: they had come! The Mighty Host, the three hundred officers the holy man’s emissary had written
her so much about.
In fact, that day it was daring Red Guards riding into town from Omsk to establish Bolshevik power in Tobolsk. And on that day the idyllic period of their captivity came to an end. The post-October world invaded quiet Tobolsk, jingling, whooping, and whistling.
After his death Rasputin managed to ruin the family yet again.
“There were no officer groups to liberate the tsar’s family! There was only talk,” Tatiana Botkina, the daughter of the doctor Evgeny Sergeyevich would exclaim in her memoirs.
Already after the tsar had been forced to leave Tobolsk, she asked one of the Tobolsk “plotters”—monarchists: “Why didn’t your organization undertake anything?”
“We organized to rescue Alexei Nikolaevich.”
When the time came for Alexei and the grand duchesses to leave Tobolsk, however, once again she posed the same question.
“Have pity, after all, we could be discovered and the Red Army could catch us all.”
“There were many organizers like that,” Botkin’s daughter concluded sadly. She considered Soloviev nothing more than a provocateur—as did many in Freedom House.
But who would have dared come out against Rasputin’s son-in-law?
Was Soloviev actually a Bolshevik agent?
Hardly. More likely they simply found each other convenient, the Cheka, the Bolshevik’s secret service, and Soloviev: two games played with the participation of the unsuspecting family.
There was the plot game organized by Boris Soloviev, who simply robbed the family. And there was one other performance, which took advantage of Soloviev’s idea by declaring his false plot genuine—to prove the necessity of the immediate transfer of the tsar’s family from quiet Tobolsk.
This second game had been born in the Red capital of the revolutionary Urals, in the town of Ekaterinburg.
Let us try to picture the cast, the game’s chief players.
Chapter 10
COMRADES
COMRADE FILIPP
In late April 1917, a guard of Kronstadt sailors stood outside Mathilde Kschessinska’s mansion: Lenin had assembled a conference of Bolsheviks in the palace of Nicholas’s former lover. It is telling that the poet Blok sensed their strange and terrible power even then.
Not long before, these men had been rotting in exile, wandering hopelessly in emigration through the cities of Europe. Now they were talking about ruling the largest country in the world. “The party that does not want power is unfit to call itself a party,” said Trotsky, the second in command of the Bolsheviks.
This was no utopia. The Bolsheviks had a powerful conspiratorial apparatus left over from their past struggles with the tsar. Russia at that time was the freest country imaginable—so they were able to act.
It was to this old conspiratorial organization that two old friends belonged who met at this conference in the Petrograd mansion—Yakov Sverdlov and Filipp Goloshchekin. Here he is in a photograph, Comrade Filipp. He is already over forty. By the standards of the revolution he is already an old man—a face flaccid from sleepless nights and bad food. And, of course, bearded. They all were—Lenin, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Kamenev.… Goloshchekin had been studying to become a dentist, but he became a professional revolutionary instead: conspiratorial apartments, party cells. His most recent nom de guerre, Filipp, became his name. He had been a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee since 1912. In 1913, while Nicholas was celebrating the tricentennial of the dynasty, Goloshchekin was captured by the police and sent to the Turukhansk region, where he met another prominent Bolshevik in exile, Yakov Sverdlov. “Sverdlov and Goloshchekin were linked not only by a commonality of views but also by personal friendship,” Sverdlov’s wife wrote in her memoirs. Both friends were freed from Turukhansk in February 1917.
After the conference in Kschessinska’s palace the head of the Ural Bolsheviks, Sverdlov, was left in Petrograd to become secretary of the Central Committee. Replacing Sverdlov in the Urals was his old friend Comrade Filipp.
As leader of the Ural Bolsheviks, Goloshchekin set out for Ekaterinburg to organize a new revolution.
At that time, in April 1917, Lenin declared they would take power by peaceful means. By July, though, the Bolsheviks were already flexing their muscle: the Kronstadt sailors entered Petrograd. But the July demonstration was put down, and Lenin declared Kerensky’s government an organ of the victorious counterrevolution and the Soviets a “fig leaf” concealing the power of the bourgeoisie. Lenin was beginning to prepare for an armed uprising.
The Provisional Government initiated a judicial inquiry: the Bolsheviks were accused of mutiny and of receiving money from Russia’s enemy, Germany. But Lenin and his closest comrade-in-arms, Zinoviev, refused to appear at the trial and hid. And although many leading Bolsheviks were arrested, the party was not banned, and three hundred party members participated in the next Bolshevik congress.
Commander-in-chief General Kornilov attempted to avert a seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. He demanded from Kerensky full authority to bring order to the rear and the front. General Krymov’s Cavalry Corps had advanced toward Petrograd.
Kerensky removed Kornilov and turned to the Soviets for help.
Lenin decided to enter into an alliance with the government—against Kornilov—and Kerensky accepted this gift. But it was a gift he would soon regret.
“Only developing this war [with Kornilov] can lead us to power,” Lenin wrote. Power! Lenin exploited the fight against Kornilov and his contact with the government magnificently for the legal arming of his own supporters in Russia’s major cities.
Comrade Filipp in Ekaterinburg was indefatigable: workers’ detachments were armed and a Red Guard headquarters created. He made the Baltic sailor Pavel Khokhryakov, picture-perfect handsome draped in ammunition belts, chief of staff.
Neighboring Perm, too, was readied for the uprising. There Gploshchekin depended on two Bolsheviks, the Lukoyanov brothers: Mikhail, leader of the Perm Bolsheviks, and Feodor, who led the workers’ Red Guard.
By fall of 1917 the Provisional Government had become a fiction. All those brilliant intellectuals had expired in interparty struggle and were incapable of controlling the dark elements they had stirred up. “The government apparatus’s collapse was complete.… A wave of barbaric pogroms incurred by greedy, hungry muzhiks rolled over Russia.… The food situation was no better. In Petrograd we had crossed the line beyond which famine began.… All the industrial centers suffered constant strikes.… The situation on the railroad was becoming ominous.… The entire press … howled in the identically same way about imminent economic catastrophe.… Wherever bold military-revolutionary committees had appeared, there was no longer any question of legal authority,” N. Sukhanov wrote in Notes on the Revolution.
In early October Goloshchekin left for Petrograd as a delegate from the Urals to the Congress of Soviets. Soon after, an urgent telegram arrived in Ekaterinburg: on October 25 the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Provisional Government.
At that point the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, their “bold military-revolutionary committees,” and the Red Guard began taking over the town.
The same happened in neighboring Perm.
As soon as the Bolsheviks had won in the Urals, Red Ekaterinburg’s gaze turned on quiet Tobolsk. There, not so far away, were the tsar and his family. The revolutionaries’ holy dream—retribution visited upon Nicholas the Bloody! That was from the realm of ideas. Moreover, rumors about the incalculable Romanov treasures brought from Petersburg … that was already the prose of life: “Behind all ideas there is always a steak,” one of the Bolshevik leaders joked.
In Ekaterinburg, Goloshchekin was working on a plan.
COMRADE MARATOV
After my first article was printed in Ogonyok, I received a brief message in the mail: “Honored Comrade Radzinsky! I can tell you certain details on a topic of interest to you.” The signature: “Alexander Vasilievich.” His first name and patronymic, but no last name, just a phone number. I called.<
br />
An old man’s voice: “Only talk louder. Bad telephone.” (Old people do not complain about their hearing, they complain about the telephone. During my inquiries I would have dealings mostly with very old people—and I would hear this sentence many times.)
I: “I received your letter.… I would like to meet with you.”
He: “We can do that.… I’ll come to you myself.” (How many times would I hear all this! They had been through a good school—Stalin’s school of fear. He did not want me to come to his place and find out who he was. He was afraid.)
He came himself: a frail old man with a cloud of translucent white hair. Slats of medals on his jacket. He began.
“If you decide to use what I’m going to tell you … I don’t want my name used.”
I interrupted. I spoke very loudly. He was hard of hearing.
“Don’t worry. After all, I don’t know your last name.”
He knew that very well, but he wanted to hear it from me one more time. No one anywhere else in the world could understand what he was afraid of now, but for anyone born in this country it was understandable: just in case, he was afraid.
He: “It’s just that this story torments me for some reason. In those years … you weren’t in the world yet … in those years people didn’t ask too many questions.… It wasn’t done.… So that the man … well, the man I’m going to speak of now I know very little about. This happened in the very early twenties. I know the man was from the Urals … my older brother was a famous neurologist he went to for treatment. I know this man had a relative who worked in the Central Committee—a ‘big fish in a little pond.’ Well, they called my brother in to examine him in his apartment, which he did. Privately, so to speak.
“This was how he came to our house.
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