The Last Tsar (42 page)

With the appearance of the “spy,” matters accelerated. Kobylinsky was barely managing with the remaining riflemen and was already begging the tsar to let them go home: “I can no longer be of use to you.” Nicholas asked him to stay on: “We are enduring it and you will too.” He stayed on.

Soon after, Lukoyanov was able to report to the capital of the Red Urals: “The guard’s mood has changed. It’s time!”

At the Urals’ Zlokazov Factory (named after the owners, the Zlokazov brothers) there was a machinist, a short man, middle-aged, with an unprepossessing, pimply face: Sergei Lyukhanov. He was a remarkable worker, a jack-of-all-trades. He was married to an “educated woman”—a teacher with the exotic name Avgusta. Before the revolution Avgusta’s brother—a certain Alexander Avdeyev—had come to the factory. Lyukhanov made him his assistant and did all his work for him. Avdeyev had not come to the factory to work. He was a professional revolutionary and occupied himself with Bolshevik agitation—at which he was very good. Tall, blond, mustached Avdeyev soon became a favorite with the Zlokazov workers. Immediately after October 1917, the workers seized the factory under his leadership: Sergei Lyukhanov’s former assistant became the factory commissar. It was he who took the former boss away on a cart, saying, “I’m taking him to jail.” But no one ever saw the boss again. A serious man was Avdeyev. “Smacking” and “liquidating” were favorite words in 1918. At the factory he formed his own armed detachment.

Now at the end of February 1918 Avdeyev was called to meet with the Cheka at the “American hotel,” where he was awaited by Pavel Khokhryakov, head of the Red Guard and now a leader of the Cheka: light brown curls, a rosy flush suffusing his face. The Baltic sailor was a handsome man and in possession of the most terrible strength. Strength and revolutionary ardor.

Here at the Cheka they discussed Goloshchekin’s plan: Khokhryakov and Avdeyev, along with his Zlokazov workers, must secretly enter Tobolsk, throw over the old rule there, and establish a new Bolshevik rule, after which they would enter into contact with Freedom House and, taking advantage of the guard’s mood, move the family to the capital of the Red Urals.

They entered the town at night in small groups. As Avdeyev himself would later describe, “the first to filter in were the secret agents, Pavel Khokhryakov and the Bolshevik Tanya Naumova.” They pretended to be lovers and one can only guess how much happiness the handsome sailor and the young girl accrued from this game, which
later ended in marriage (although they would not be happy in that marriage for long—the frenzied Khokhryakov would perish the same year in the Civil War).

Then Avdeyev’s group entered Tobolsk—sixteen men. Cleverly, though, they spread a rumor about a thousand Bolsheviks surrounding the town. Tobolsk’s frightened inhabitants seized on the rumor and the thousand turned into thousands. But Avdeyev’s men were too late.

Yet another pretender to the title of jailer to the tsar’s family had entered the game: Omsk, the revolutionary capital of western Siberia. Its men too had come to Tobolsk—for the tsar’s family and their jewels.

Nicholas’s diary:

“14 (27) March.… The arrival of this Red Guard [from Omsk], as any armed unit is now called, has provoked all sorts of conjectures and fears here.… The commandant and our detachment have also been disturbed—the guard has been strengthened and the cannon brought in as of yesterday. It is good that people have come to trust one another at the present time.”

The Omsk men attempted to force the guard to let the detachment into the house. The house was surrounded. But Kobylinsky and the detachment had brought out the cannon. Freedom House remained under guard.

Goloshchekin sent through Tyumen for one more detachment from Ekaterinburg. But the Omsk men were stronger.

Nicholas’s diary:

“22 March [Nicholas went back to the old style. From now until the end of his diary he would remain true to the old style, the style of his world]. In the morning we heard from outside the Bolshevik brigands from Tyumen leaving Tobolsk.… In 15 troikas, jingling, whistling, and whooping away. The Omsk detachment drove them out of here.”

The Omsk men had celebrated their victory prematurely, however. Ekaterinburg dealt a new blow. A third armed detachment of Ekaterinburg men under Zaslavsky entered the town. Simultaneously the Ekaterinburg men seized power in the Soviet. Now Khokhryakov became chairman of the Soviet and Avdeyev and Zaslavsky its most influential members. The Soviet of Ekaterinburg men began to run Tobolsk, but their expectations were not borne out. Despite the fact that they were now the municipal authority, despite all Matveyev’s efforts, they were not allowed into Freedom House either.

Kobylinsky announced to the Soviet: “We have been sent here by
the central authorities, and we will hand over the tsar and his family only to the central authorities.”

A battle of telegrams began around the house. The Omsk Soviet telegraphed Moscow to order the “old guard” replaced by an Omsk detachment. The Tobolsk Soviet demanded that Moscow replace the old guard with the Ekaterinburg Red Guard.

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.

T
his 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?