The Last Tsar (46 page)

The Emperor of All the Russias was gnawing on a crust of black bread intended for the dogs?

No, there is another altogether unsentimental interpretation to that scene.

From Matveyev’s Notes:

“I looked at Romanov and saw he was very agitated and chewing the dry crust more out of agitation than anything else.”

Yes, the closer they got to Ekaterinburg, the more agitated he became. He did not want to frighten Alix and was probably reassuring her. But he told Matveyev the truth.

From Matveyev’s Notes:

“Nicholas said, ‘I would go anywhere at all but the Urals.… Judging from the papers, the Urals are harshly against me.’”

He was still hoping that the “good riflemen” from the old guard would undertake something.

At 8:40 in the morning, the train stopped among the countless tracks of the Ekaterinburg’s main station. The train was standing a few tracks from the nearest platform. From behind the lowered curtains the tsar saw that, despite the early hour, the platform was filled with a restless crowd.

Early on the morning of April 30, a driver from the Ural Soviet’s garage was ordered to take a car to the house belonging to the engineer Ipatiev, at the corner of Ascension Avenue and Ascension Lane. Very recently, at the order of the Ural Soviet, Ipatiev had been told to vacate the premises within forty-eight hours. The house was surrounded by a high fence. A guard was posted. Soon after, an astonishing rumor spread through the town: the tsar’s family would be living in that guarded house.

An immense crowd was standing by it.

Ural Commissar Goloshchekin himself walked out through the gates of the Ipatiev house as the automobile drove up. He ordered the driver, Feodor Samokhvalov, to take him to Ekaterinburg’s main train station, where Goloshchekin ordered him to wait while he ran off somewhere, then returned and ordered Samokhvalov to drive to Ekaterinburg’s freight station.

All this was Goloshchekin’s sly maneuver to get the crowd by the house to disperse.

From the memoirs of Housing Commissar Zhilinsky (kept in the Sverdlovsk Party Archive):

“We decided to trick the people and send cars to the main station and from there continue to the freight station, where we were to pick up the Romanovs. That was what we did. Everyone followed the cars to the main station.”

The crowd was indignant.

From Yakovlev’s memoirs:

“The air was filled with an unimaginable din, threatening shouts were heard time and again.… The disorderly crowd had begun to advance on our men.… The guard standing on the platform was not making much of an effort to hold back the press of people.

“ ‘Bring the Romanovs out, and let me spit in his face….’

“ ‘Get out the machine guns….’

“That had an effect. The crowd recoiled. Threatening shouts flew in my direction.”

At the same time the train sent by the Stationmaster advanced on the crowd. The crowd rushed back—and a long line of comrades walled off the raging crowd from the train.

From Yakovlev’s memoirs:

“Curses and shouts were heard … and while the crowd was making its way through the buffer of a freight train … we got under way and disappeared among the countless tracks of the Ekaterinburg station. Fifteen minutes later we were in complete safety at the freight station.”

From Nicholas’s diary:

“17 [30] April. Tuesday. Another marvelous warm day. At 8.40 we arrived in Ekaterinburg. Stopped for about 3 hours at one station, where there was powerful ferment between the local commissars and ours.”

And not a word about the raging crowd! The tsar did not want to describe his crazed former subjects.

A meeting had been arranged at the freight station.

Forty Red Guards immediately uncoupled the train.

On the platform stood three leaders of the Ural Soviet:

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.

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 willingly 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.