Twenty-seven years old, blue-eyed, wearing a large white fur cap—Comrade Alexander Beloborodov. A former electrical repairman, now chairman of the Soviet, or, as he liked to refer to himself, head of the revolutionary government of the Red Urals;
Comrade Filipp (Isai) Goloshchekin—leader of the Ural Bolsheviks;
And yet another influential member of the Soviet—Comrade Boris Ditkovsky, son of a tsarist officer, educated in Petersburg, student at the Military School, graduate of the University of Geneva, brilliant mining engineer.
All were very decisive men.
At that moment the sharpshooters of the old guard rebelled. They had realized what lay in store for the Romanovs. The sharpshooters stood in the doors of the train car and would not let anyone in. Yakovlev attempted to use this last opportunity to his advantage. The commissar was not one to give up until he had reached the end of his rope. Yakovlev demanded to be put in contact with Moscow.
All this went on for an hour and a half. The troika was tired. The three decisive men were sick of waiting.
They announced that if they were not allowed into the car immediately, the Red Guard would open fire on the train. Only then did Yakovlev placate the sharpshooters.
All eight sharpshooters were disarmed, and by evening they were sitting in the Ekaterinburg jail, whence Yakovlev freed them with great difficulty.
Beloborodov entered the train car. After exchanging dry greetings with the plenipotentiary, he sat down and wrote a receipt (see Appendix). Yakovlev led the family out of the car.
Ten years later the artist V. Pchelin drew a picture for the Sverdlovsk Museum of the Revolution, The Delivery of the Romanovs to the Ural Soviet. That was what it was, a delivery. It was not just chance that “cargo” and “baggage” had been the designations for the powerless family in Yakovlev’s telegrams. The Bolsheviks did receive them like baggage—at a freight station—and signed for them. This was the Ural revolutionaries’ savage humor.
What a picturesque group of the slain it was that day at the Ekaterinburg freight station: Nicholas, his wife and daughter—all would be shot in a little more than two months. But those who were receiving them—Goloshchekin, Beloborodov, Ditkovsky—would also be shot, albeit twenty years later.
They were put into automobiles. In one were Nicholas, the Uralite Avdeyev, now appointed commandant of the Ipatiev house, or the “house of special designation,” as it would be called in all the official papers, and next to Nicholas Comrade Beloborodov. The former tsar next to the present ruler of the Urals. In the other car were Comrades Ditkovsky and Goloshchekin, the former Grand Duchess Marie, and the former empress.
Behind them in a truck were the Red Guards. Nicholas, I think, appreciated this ironic smile of fate. It was all just like in the good old days: the leaders of the province met him at the station and an escort of soldiers accompanied him to the house.
Nicholas’s diary:
“The train went to the other, freight station. After an hour and a half wait we left the train. Yakovlev handed us over to the district commissar and the three of us got in an auto and drove down the deserted streets to the Ipatiev house, which had been made ready for us.”
Alix’s diary:
“At 3 were told to get out of the train. Yakovlev had to give us over to the Ural Soviet. Their Chief took us 3 in an open motor, and a truck with soldiers … followed.”
Thus they parted. Comrade Yakovlev and the former tsar. But the Uralites were serious people. They obviously continued to have the most serious intentions with respect to the cunning commissar. Sverdlov was forced to intervene. A telegram arrived addressed to Beloborodov and Goloshchekin: “Everything Yakovlev does is a direct execution of my order…. Give Yakovlev your complete confidence. Sverdlov.”
Goloshchekin understood the signal—and momentarily placated the zealous Uralites. On the evening of April 30, the Ural Soviet heard Yakovlev’s report. The Soviet passed a resolution “rehabilitating” the plenipotentiary.
WHO WAS HE?
Yakovlev’s life took an astonishing turn after this.
Late in May on the Volga, in the southern Urals, and in Siberia, an uprising of the Czech Legion ignited against the Bolsheviks. To fight them, an eastern front was created, led by former tsarist officer and Socialist Revolutionary M. Muraviev. Ordered to command one of those armies in the area of Ufa and Orenburg was Yakovlev.
But on July 10 Muraviev mutinied against the Bolsheviks and was murdered while under arrest in Kazan.
Then Yakovlev quit the front and returned secretly to his native Ufa, now freed of Bolsheviks, where he declared that he had “overcome the idea of bolshevism” and went over to the White Army.
He directed an appeal to the soldiers of the Red Army:
“With this letter I appeal to you, the rank-and-file soldiers, not your irresponsible leaders who through their tyranny are deciding the fates of our poor, lacerated homeland.… The people are grumbling, protesting, thrashing about in their death throes. Here and there rebellions are flaring up.… A terrible civil slaughter is in progress—and there is not one free citizen in Russia left who can be certain of tomorrow.… As in the final days of autocracy … when ominous specters of the end of popular patience were in the air, now too everything is flaring up against Soviet power, and it will collapse, crushing all of you with its weight.… Former Commander-in-Chief of the Bolshevik Ural-Orenburg Front V. Yakovlev.”
Further followed an altogether astonishing finale: having gone over to the Whites, Yakovlev was hastily shot in a White Guard counterintelligence cellar. Such was the well-known version of the death of the Central Executive Committee plenipotentiary cited in so many works.
We have to get used to it, though: the people in our story have a tendency to get resurrected. “Yakovlev shot by the Whites” turned out to have survived! A certain investigator into particularly important matters, Major N. Leshkin, who had access to secret documents (a new type of historian for us Russians) published extracts from the secret “Yakovlev case.”
It turns out that Yakovlev survived happily in China in the 1920s under the name Stoyanovich. There had been no execution. In 1919 Yakovlev had simply fled Russia for Harbin. In 1927, though, he decided to return to the Soviet Union. Naturally, he would fall in the hands of the same organization he himself had once helped found. After a prolonged investigation, he was convicted. Only his revolutionary services saved him from a firing squad. He was sent to the terrible Solovetsky camp and the White Sea—Baltic Canal.
In his article, however, Leshkin cites some surprising statements from an old Chekist who in 1929, “while Myachin was being tried as Stoyanovich, was at the Higher Courses in Moscow and heard the following story from Artur Artuzov, the head of Soviet intelligence:
“ ‘In the Civil War there were victims who for the good of the cause soiled their name with treason.… For instance, Kostya Myachin went over to Kolchak with the approval of the Cheka. He retreated to China, where he accomplished a great deal as Stoyanovich. This is not the time to speak of this, as it would shed unwanted light on our agents. He was a model resident. They began to wise up to him. Stoyanovich was forced to return. Now he has been convicted, but that was necessary. Soon we will vindicate and reward him.”
Indeed, in two years Yakovlev received early release for “selfless labor on the White Sea—Baltic Canal.”
So, was there no treason? Was there no crime? Was he a true Bolshevik and loyal Chekist, Kostya Myachin? But in the terrible year 1937, at the height of Stalinist repressions, when Yakovlev was driven out of every job he got, he would write a desperate letter to Stalin that included this sentence:
“How can I be allowed to be punished again for the same crime?”
So, there was a crime! And for that he was punished?
More confusion—this mysterious man with three names. Who was he really? A loyal Bolshevik, a model Chekist … or …?
A gambler who played complicated double games all his life, who wil
lingly entered into the most incredible adventures, who after his secret mission became thoroughly disenchanted with the Bolsheviks. He realized that high ideals had been replaced by a shameless struggle for power. When he went over to the Whites, though, he soon saw that they did not believe the former Red commissar and hated him. His wife tells in her memoirs how often he did not sleep at night, how he was constantly exclaiming, tormented: “What have I done?”
Then this fantastic man devised a new twist in his fate: he fled the Whites for China, where he became an adviser to the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and, evidently, made contact with Soviet intelligence.
Thus he attempted to earn the right to return to his homeland. He was wrong, though: he had been too prominent a figure, and too many of his enemies remained in the homeland. They had not forgiven his betrayal. When he found himself in the camps, he wrote endless requests to the government for his release, mentioning his services to the revolution. That was when he created his memoirs, The Romanovs’ Last Trip. Written in the camps, they were nothing more than another attempt to cite his services. By then Trotsky had been sent out of the country and Trotskyism had been routed, however, and Yakovlev, of course, was afraid to write that the chief purpose of his mission had been to bring the tsar’s family to Moscow to the trial Lev Trotsky had dreamed of. Instead he repeated the lie that had once confused the Uralites: from the very outset he had been taking the tsar to Ekaterinburg. Oh well, Sverdlov was long since in his grave, and there was no one to refute him, and he did not know that in the Urals his former companion Matveyev would write the following in his Notes: “Yakovlev … called me in and asked me a question: Had I ever had to execute secret military instructions. Once he received my affirmative answer, Yakovlev told me that he had been assigned the task of transferring the former tsar to Moscow.”
Of course, Yakovlev’s memoirs contain no reply to the most important question: When did he “overcome the idea of bolshevism”? If that happened after he went to get the tsar, then everything is clear.
But what if it was before?
Then his entire journey appears in an entirely new light. His softness, his heartfelt conversations, and, finally, the puzzling telegram the former grand duchesses received in Tobolsk with his signature: “We are traveling well. Christ be with you. How is Little One’s health. Yakovlev.” What an unlikely vocabulary for a Bolshevik! Of course, this was the tsar’s telegram. The last telegram of Nicholas II. Which Yakovlev sent over his own signature. A Bolshevik commissar sending the telegram of Nicholas the Bloody over his own signature?
Revolution is a time of little Napoleons. Perhaps this man with three names was playing his own, third game. There was Sverdlov’s game, there was Goloshchekin’s game, but there was also Yakovlev’s desperate game. Perhaps he never intended to take his train to Moscow after Omsk at all. An interesting note slipped into the tsaritsa’s diary:
“April 16 (29). In train.… The Omsk Soviet of Deputies does not let us go through Omsk since they are afraid they want to take us to Japan.”
Might there be some truth in this half-hint? Might the mysterious plenipotentiary have hinted only to her, the true head of the family, of his goal? Hence his behavior with the tsarist couple?
But the inevitable end awaited those who made the revolution. On September 16, 1938, the last companion of the last tsar, Yakovlev-Myachin-Stoyanovich, was arrested and disappeared forever into Stalin’s camps, taking his secret with him.
Chapter 12
THE LAST HOUSE
Above the town, on the highest hill, rose the Church of the Ascension. Next to the church a few houses formed Ascension Square.
One of these houses stood directly opposite the church—low-slung, white, with thick walls and a stone carving all the way across the facade, which was turned toward the boulevard and the church. One of the house’s thick sides dropped down a slope along blind Ascension Lane. Here the windows of the first half-cellar barely peeked out from below ground level.
One of these half-cellar windows was between two trees. This was the window of that very room to which we will find ourselves returning.
Driving up to the house, however, they saw none of this. The house was masked nearly to the roof by a very high fence. Only a bit of the uppermost part of the second-floor windows looked out.
Around the house stood the guard.
This house belonged to the engineer Ipatiev, an unlucky man. An influential member of the Soviet and also a graduate of the University of Geneva, Peter Voikov was the son of a mining engineer. He knew Ipatiev and had been in this house with the thick walls that was so conveniently situated (from the standpoint of guarding it).
That is why at the very end of April the engineer was called in to the Soviet of Deputies and ordered to clear out of his house in twenty-four hours. They promised “to return the house soon” (engineer Ipatiev did not understand the portent in this statement). He was ordered to leave all his furniture where it was and put his personal possessions into storage.
The cement storeroom was located on the first floor, next to a half-cellar room—the execution room.
Both cars drove along the fence to the plank gates.
The gates opened and the cars were allowed in. Neither Nicholas nor Alix nor their daughter would ever leave those gates alive.
They were led across the paved courtyard to the house. In the entry, a carved wooden staircase ascended to the second floor.
Standing by the stairs, Beloborodov made a formal announcement: “By decision of the Central Executive Committee, the former tsar Nicholas Romanov and his family are transferred to the conduct of the Ural Soviet and shall henceforth be located in Ekaterinburg with the status of prisoners. Until their trial. Comrade Avdeyev has been appointed house commandant, and all requests and complaints shall be made to the Ural Executive Committee through the commandant.”
After which both Ural leaders, Goloshchekin and Beloborodov, went off in a car and the family was invited to tour their new quarters in the company of the commandant and Ditkovsky.
Nicholas’s diary:
“Little by little our people arrived, as well as our things, but they would not let Valya in.”
Yes, their things arrived, and along with them Botkin and their people.
But not Dolgorukov. Poor Valya was taken away somewhere directly from the station. Somewhere….
Subsequently a rumor spread that two guns and many thousands in cash had been found on Prince Dolgorukov. This was reported in Tobolsk by the returning riflemen of the old guard. Why would Dolgorukov have had two guns? One way or another, Nicholas would not see Valya again; the prince had disappeared for good.
M. Medvedev (the son of a Chekist who participated in the execution of the tsar’s family) told the story to me:
“Dolgorukov was shot by the young Chekist Grigory Nikulin. Nikulin said so himself. I don’t remember the details anymore, I remember he took Dolgorukov out with his suitcases into a field.”
“You mean this was immediately after the train? If there were suitcases?”
“I just don’t remember. I only remember there was snow, and after the execution Nikulin himself had to carry Dolgorukov’s suitcases across a snowy field. The snow was deep and he cursed all the way.”
Thus perished this charmer, the gallant cavalier at the brilliant Winter Palace balls.
Nicholas’s diary:
“The house is fine, clean. We have been assigned 4 rooms: a corner bedroom, a lavatory, next door a dining room with windows onto a little garden and a view of a low-lying part of town, and finally, a spacious hall with arches in place of doors.
“We arranged ourselves in the following manner: Alix, Marie, and I together in the bedroom. A shared lavatory. Demidova in the dining room, and in the hall—Botkin, Chemodurov, and Sednev. In order to get to the washroom and water closet one must go past the sentry. A very high wooden fence has been built around the house 2 sazhens [14 feet] from the windows: a chain of sentries ha
s been posted there and in the little garden too.”
Here the drama’s last act would unfold. The dynasty’s finale.
THE FINALE SET
The tsar and tsaritsa would be staying in the spacious corner room with four windows. Two windows looked out on Ascension Avenue, but the high fence two sazhens from the windows closed off the view. Only the cross over the bell tower was visible from the rooms. The two other windows looked out onto Ascension Lane, which was a dead end. The room was very light, with pale yellow wallpaper covered by a free-form frieze of faded flowers.
A rug on the floor, a baize-covered table, a bronze lamp with a handmade lamp shade, a small card table, a bookcase between the windows where she would put her books. Two beds (Alexei would sleep on one of them when he was brought from Tobolsk), and a couch.
Her vanity and mirror with two electric lamps on the sides, on the table a jar of cold cream with the inscription “Court Pharmacy to His Excellency.”
How strange that inscription sounded already.
A washbasin on a cracked marble counter and an armoire, which now held all the clothing of the former tsar and tsaritsa.
Next to their room, with windows on Ascension Lane, was a large empty room. In it were a table, chairs, and a large pier glass. The four daughters would live in this room. They would come, in May, and until their camp beds were brought they would sleep on mattresses right on the floor.
Both these rooms were directly above that half-cellar room.
Next to the daughters’ room, in the dining room “with the view on the garden,” slept Anna Demidova. In the large hall (the drawing room) slept Botkin, Chemodurov, and Sednev.
There was one more as yet sealed room—designated for Alexei.
Catercorner from the former grand duchesses was the commandant’s room—date palm wallpaper, gold baguette molding, and the head of a dead deer. And one more—next to the commandant’s—set aside for the watch.
The Last Tsar Page 34