Simultaneously Goloshchekin was sending Moscow “accurate information” obtained from Lukoyanov about the monarchist Soloviev’s plot and the flight being readied for the family “as soon as the rivers open.” He even specified that the escape was supposed to be accomplished on the vessel Maria. But Moscow was enigmatically silent.
Meanwhile in Tobolsk, the Red Guard detachments were waiting for someone to approach the house. They were afraid of the guard’s excellently armed, tsarist-trained riflemen. They were afraid of each other.
Finally Moscow decided to intervene.
Chapter 11
SECRET MISSION
This puzzling episode began at the very beginning of April 1918, when announcements started appearing in the papers about “the impending trial in Moscow against Nicholas the Bloody.”
On April 1 the Central Executive Committee passed a secret resolution: “To form a detachment of 200 men and send it to Tobolsk to reinforce the guard. Should the opportunity arise, to transfer the prisoners to Moscow.” The resolution was not intended for publication in the press; however, it immediately became known to the Uralites (Sverdlov? Of course, Sverdlov!), provoking a storm of indignation in Ekaterinburg.
As a result Sverdlov “was forced to back down”: the Central Executive Committee passed an “addendum” to the earlier resolution: “1. The tsar and his family shall be moved to the Urals. 2. For this, military reinforcement will be sent to Tobolsk.”
Sverdlov sent an official letter covering all this to Ekaterinburg on April 9.
Why did the powerful supporters of a Moscow trial against the tsar agree to this “addendum”? Only because Sverdlov evidently reassured them, and there was only one way he could have done that: by explaining that the “addendum” had been passed only to quiet the energetic Uralites and avert an independent seizure of the tsar’s family by Ekaterinburg.
Indeed, the “armed reinforcement” sent to Tobolsk had a secret mission: to bring the tsar and his family to Moscow.
Clever Sverdlov did not explain, however, that the “addendum” would now give Ekaterinburg the legal right to demand the tsar’s family for itself.
Sverdlov’s double game had begun. Oh, how that game would mislead all future investigators.
Placed at the head of the secret mission was Vasily Yakovlev.
Commissar Yakovlev. Here he is in his big fur hat, a sailor’s shirt visible underneath his open sheepskin coat. His face is “rather intelligent,” as Dr. Botkin’s daughter described it.
What biographies! And how infuriatingly bland our own lives!
Vasily Yakovlev—that was his party nom de guerre from one of his many fake passports. His real name was Konstantin Myachin. Born in 1886 in Ufa, he had worked quietly and peaceably as a turner for the railroad until the First Russian Revolution drew him into its many storms. The nineteen-year-old turner Myachin became a member of an armed workers’ detachment—in plain words, a terrorist. Lenin had very eloquently defined the tasks of those armed workers’ detachments in a letter to the Petersburg Bolshevik Action Committee dated October 3, 1905: “Establish … armed workers’ detachments anywhere and everywhere—especially among students and workers.… Each should arm itself immediately according to its own abilities: one with a revolver, another with a knife, another with a kerosene-soaked rag to set fires, etc. The detachments must start their military training right away in immediate operations. One right now could undertake the murder of a secret agent or the bombing of a police station; another could assault a bank to confiscate funds for the uprising. Let each detachment train itself, if only for assaulting policemen.”
This ruthless and sinisterly romantic group in the party took shape on spilled blood: bank robberies, bombings, assassinations of officials. “Starting with my first speech, bullets and a soaped rope dogged my heels,” Myachin wrote with pride.
Very quickly the party status of these armed detachments became rather ambiguous. At their 1907 congress, the Bolsheviks discussed terror and prohibited expropriations. As always in Bolshevik history, though, the obvious concealed the hidden. The First Revolution had ended in defeat, and the Bolsheviks feverishly sought funds—both to live in emigration and to create a secret underground in Russia. Having prohibited terrorism for the sake of public opinion, they secretly encouraged it. It was then, in Tiflis in 1907, that Joseph Stalin prepared his attack on a post office and seized funds totaling more than a million dollars. It was then in 1907 that Myachin became leader of the Ufa armed workers’ detachment. And soon after, at the Miass station, a mail train was seized: led by Myachin, the workers stole 72 pounds of gold. They were tracked down, and arrests followed. Myachin escaped by shooting his way out.
Ever since his youth, secret activity had shaped this man’s character.
He crossed the border illegally—with a passport in the name of Vasily Yakovlev. In Italy—in Bologna and on Capri—he created a Marxist school (that is what the tsarist gold was used for!). Yakovlev and his comrades did not recognize parliamentary struggle against the authorities. In their school they taught underground work—how to hide and murder. During this time he crossed the Russian border illegally more than once. In a conspiratorial apartment in Kiev in 1911, he prepared to seize the treasury, but the police came upon his trail. Yakovlev managed to vanish from the city, fleeing Kiev right as Tsar Nicholas II was making a triumphant entrance into the city. (It was at this time in Kiev that Stolypin was murdered right in front of the tsar.)
Another illegal border crossing: Yakovlev turned up in Belgium. The bomber and expropriator became a modest electrical repairman for the General Electric Company in Brussels.
After the February Revolution he returned posthaste to Russia. In October 1917 he was in Petrograd preparing for the Bolshevik takeover and secretly bringing in weapons. During the Bolshevik overthrow, Vasily Yakovlev, perched on a cannon, and a detachment of sailors traversed all of Petrograd to seize the telephone station and cut off the provisional government, gathered in the Winter Palace, from the world.
After the Bolshevik victory Yakovlev became commissar of all the telegraph and telephone stations in Petrograd. In 1918, Vasily Yakovlev was among five men whom the Bolshevik government instructed to create the sinister Cheka. Throughout 1918 Yakovlev’s name popped up in many political events. On the night the Bolsheviks dispersed the Constituent Assembly on Lenin’s order, Yakovlev repeated his October trick: he disconnected the telephone system in the Tauride Palace. Later he brought forty train cars of grain to starving Petrograd. In his wake there was a great deal of crossfire and blood. He made one more lucky transshipment: he brought twenty-five million gold rubles out of besieged Petrograd to the Ufa bank—accompanied once again by chases and shooting.
This was the legendary man who was sitting in Sverdlov’s office in the early spring of 1918.
It was Sverdlov who proposed sending Yakovlev to Tobolsk to bring out the Romanovs. Trotsky, who knew Yakovlev well, also approved his candidacy: after all, Yakovlev had already made more than one high-risk run.
There was one detail in Yakovlev’s biography, though, known only to Sverdlov, who had worked in the Urals for a long time. Back during the time of the underground and expropriations, a “black cat” had run between Ufa’s Yakovlev and Ekaterinburg’s armed workers, and at the very beginning of 1918, when Moscow appointed Yakovlev military commissar of the entire Urals, Ekaterinburg flatly rejected him. They preferred someone else. So Goloshchekin, the head of the Ural Bolsheviks, became military commissar. Yakovlev’s mandate had to be reversed. The mutual ill will between Yakovlev and the Uralites had acquired new fuel.
Was this why the clever leader of the Central Executive Committee appointed Yakovlev to head the secret mission?
Sverdlov handed Commissar Yakovlev the ominous mandate of a Central Executive Committee plenipotentiary, a mandate bearing the signatures of Lenin and Sverdlov that obligated everyone to facilitate the plenipotentiary’s mission—or be shot for failure to obey order
s. The powerful mandate said not a word, however, about the mission’s purpose.
Sverdlov explained Yakovlev’s task to him orally: the tsar’s family must be brought to Moscow.
Sverdlov asked Yakovlev his plan of action. Yakovlev proposed the typical plan of that insane period: without explaining anything to anyone (citing state secrecy), he would take the tsar’s family out of Tobolsk and down the frozen Tobol to Tyumen, where there was a railroad. He would put the family on a train and start out in the direction of Ekaterinburg, so as not to provoke any hostility on the part of the Uralites. But once he was well out of Tyumen he would turn toward Omsk—eastward. He would take the tsar’s family to Moscow via Omsk, which was at odds right then with Ekaterinburg. Should circumstances intervene, he would take the tsar’s family to his own Ufa, where there were people loyal to him and where it would be quite simple to continue on with the family to Moscow whenever necessary.
Sverdlov suggested keeping a third plan in reserve: if all else failed, Yakovlev could take the family to Ekaterinburg. The former terrorist was quite sure of himself, however. In his previous high-risk escapades he had always triumphed, and he would triumph this time as well: the tsar’s family would be in Moscow.
Yakovlev had two telegraphists put at his disposal—he must maintain constant contact with Moscow and Sverdlov. The telegrams were to use a code of sorts: “cargo” and “baggage” meant the tsar’s family; the “old route” was the Moscow route; the “new route” was the Ufa route; and finally, the “first route” was the Ekaterinburg route.
Having received his assignment, Yakovlev immediately left for Ufa to assemble a detachment. Ufa was his home, he had old friends there. The local Cheka formed a detachment of reliable men, the majority of them former comrades who had taken part in seizing the Miass gold. Yakovlev referred to them affectionately as the Miass robbers.
In Ufa, Yakovlev summoned the leader of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, Military Commissar Filipp Goloshchekin.
Yakovlev presented his mandate and demanded that Goloshchekin write orders subordinating all the Ekaterinburg men in Tobolsk—the head of the Tobolsk Soviet Pavel Khokhryakov, Avdeyev, and so on—to Yakovlev.
Certainly, Goloshchekin was prepared to give him the paper, but first he demanded that Yakovlev disclose the purpose of his mission: after all, the Central Executive Committee had already promised the tsar’s family to Ekaterinburg. Yakovlev explained that the tsars family would be brought to Ekaterinburg, just as the Central Executive Committee had promised, but no one must know that yet. Especially in Tobolsk. Why the secrecy? Yakovlev had a likely explanation: otherwise the Omsk detachment in Tobolsk would make trouble and matters might go as far as open conflict. Moreover, the old guard could mutiny as well. They had a long-standing dislike for the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks from the Tobolsk Soviet—it was no accident that they refused even to let them into Freedom House. That was why Yakovlev asked Goloshchekin to order the Ekaterinburg men to obey him without question.
Goloshchekin gave him his written order.
All this was a game. Of course, Goloshchekin, Sverdlov’s old friend, had had information about the true purpose of Yakovlev’s secret mission for a long time, and he had prepared for it.
What was Lukoyanov doing while Yakovlev and his detachment were leaving for Tobolsk?
After the middle of March, after Khokhryakov and Avdeyev and their detachment entered the town, he evidently left for Perm. In any event, on March 15, 1918, Feodor Lukoyanov was named head of the Perm Cheka. At the end of April, however, he left Perm again—“to put down kulak disturbances.” In fact, he evidently returned to Freedom House: Goloshchekin had declared that the decisive moment was near.
Meanwhile, in Freedom House, life went on as usual.
Nicholas’s diary:
“7 [20] April. Saturday.… Vespers at 9. An excellent bass sang.”
As always, vespers on Saturday. An electric light burned dimly in the large hall, and the icon of the Savior shone in the half-dark.
Alix entered the empty hall and covered the lectern with her own embroidery. And left. At eight the priest, accompanied by four monks from the monastery, entered the hall with a chasuble. Candles were lit. Dolgorukov, Tatishchev, and Botkin formed a line to the left of the lectern, and then came the ladies-in-waiting of the former court and the various “people.”
Finally a tiny door in the wall opened, and in walked the family.
The chorus and the “excellent bass” began to sing: “Glory to God from on high.” The family knelt, whereupon everyone else dropped down as well.
Thus they greeted their favorite day, April 8, the twenty-fourth anniversary of their engagement. That night, as always, they reminisced … brother Ernie, Wilhelm, Georgie, Ella. Where were they now? Grandmother Queen Victoria was long since in her grave. Nevertheless, all that had happened. There had been a kiss in Coburg Castle. And there had been a young man and a young woman—insanely happy. Or rather, happy and insane, for, “Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars….”
But on this special anniversary Nicholas learned he was no longer allowed to wear his epaulets. Nor was “Little One” either. His epaulets were a kind of connecting thread: he wore epaulets with his father’s initials, and his son wore his, Nicholas’s.
I can imagine how impatiently Matveyev and the “spy” waited for him to go on his walk—to read what he had written in his diary.
Evidently, the usual ritual took place: Matveyev roamed the halls, keeping watch, and Lukoyanov entered the room.
On the desk, as usual, all was compulsively in place: pencils, a few watches—part of his collection—and, finally, the diary.
Lukoyanov read:
“8 [21] April. Sunday. The 24th anniversary of our engagement!… Mass at 11.30, after which Kobylinsky showed me a telegram from Moscow that confirmed the detachment committee’s decision to take our epaulets away from me and Alexei. My decision: not to wear them for walks but wear them only at home. Shall not forget this beastliness!”
Lukoyanov finally understood: the tsar was stubbornly writing everything in the diary. Even assuming (he had to assume!) the possibility of the diary’s being read by his enemies. Herein lay Nicholas’s contempt for them.
That was when the “spy” got an idea!
He could not carry out his idea in Tobolsk, though, for the next day everything changed.
THE PLENIPOTENTIARY ARRIVES
On an April morning in 1918, Avdeyev, a member of the Tobolsk Soviet of Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks, was on his way from Tobolsk to his native Ekaterinburg. Avdeyev was pleased because he was carrying the long-awaited documents: information (the tsaritsa’s correspondence and so on) about the monarchist plot of Rasputin’s son-in-law Soloviev, obtained by the “spy,” and a resolution of the Tobolsk Soviet: in view of the threat of escape by Nicholas the Bloody from Tobolsk, begging the Ural Soviet to transfer the tsar’s family to Ekaterinburg.
On the platform where Avdeyev was waiting for his train, he saw a military unit disembarking. The sight of unfamiliar armed men greatly disturbed him. He counted fifteen cavalry and twenty infantry. This was a time of furious hostility between Omsk and the Urals, which made him think another Omsk detachment had arrived, so he decided to ferret out information about what kind of soldiers they were.
He walked over to the train, asked for the officer in charge, and was led to a man wearing a sheepskin coat over a sailor’s shirt and a big fur hat. Avdeyev presented the man his papers from the Tobolsk Soviet. The man read them, got very excited, announced, “You’re just the man I need,” and showed the Ekaterinburg man his mandate with the signatures of Lenin and Sverdlov. He also showed him the written instructions signed by Goloshchekin ordering all Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks in the Tobolsk Soviet to obey Central Executive Committee plenipotentiary Yakovlev without question.
Avdeyev had to return to Tobolsk with the detachment.
Avdeyev and Yakovlev were on hor
seback. Yakovlev was asking Avdeyev about Freedom House. Avdeyev replied listlessly: he did not know the details, the guard would not let them inside the house.
After traveling some 20 versts (13 miles), they noticed chains of soldiers up ahead. At first they thought: White Cossacks! Fortunately, matters did not go so far as firing: through binoculars they saw a red flag and red ribbons on fur hats. The horsemen galloped toward one another.
It turned out to be the detachment sent from Ekaterinburg to Tobolsk … for the Romanovs!
This was Ural Military Commissar Goloshchekin’s first surprise. Yakovlev was shocked to realize that Ekaterinburg was controlling him.
Now they proceeded together, the two detachments. Yakovlev galloped on his horse flanked by two Ural horsemen—Avdeyev and the detachment commander, the Uralite Busyatsky.
One of the Miass robbers recorded in his memoirs their amazing conversation en route. Busyatsky suggested a plan to Yakovlev: when Yakovlev took the tsar and his family out of Tobolsk, en route, near the village of Ievlevo, Busyatsky’s detachment could stage an ambush on Yakovlev’s detachment, as if they were trying to free the tsar and his family. In the crossfire they could do away with all the Romanovs. “We should be finishing off the executioner, not wasting our time on him,” said the Ekaterinburg man.
In reply Yakovlev silently showed Busyatsky his mandate: that all should obey him, the plenipotentiary of the Central Executive Committee, in everything. Busyatsky only chuckled. He was silent the rest of the way.
Thus, on April 22, 1918, both detachments entered the town of Tobolsk.
In Tobolsk there was one more surprise: another detachment from Ekaterinburg, led by the Bolshevik Zaslavsky, was waiting for Yakovlev.
The Last Tsar Page 31