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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