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Was Soloviev actually a Bolshevik agent?

Hardly. More likely they simply found each other convenient, the Cheka, the Bolshevik’s secret service, and Soloviev: two games played with the participation of the unsuspecting family.

There was the plot game organized by Boris Soloviev, who simply robbed the family. And there was one other performance, which took advantage of Soloviev’s idea by declaring his false plot genuine—to prove the necessity of the immediate transfer of the tsar’s family from quiet Tobolsk.

This second game had been born in the Red capital of the revolutionary Urals, in the town of Ekaterinburg.

Let us try to picture the cast, the game’s chief players.

Chapter 10

COMRADES

COMRADE FILIPP

In late April 1917, a guard of Kronstadt sailors stood outside Mathilde Kschessinska’s mansion: Lenin had assembled a conference of Bolsheviks in the palace of Nicholas’s former lover. It is telling that the poet Blok sensed their strange and terrible power even then.

Not long before, these men had been rotting in exile, wandering hopelessly in emigration through the cities of Europe. Now they were talking about ruling the largest country in the world. “The party that does not want power is unfit to call itself a party,” said Trotsky, the second in command of the Bolsheviks.

This was no utopia. The Bolsheviks had a powerful conspiratorial apparatus left over from their past struggles with the tsar. Russia at that time was the freest country imaginable—so they were able to act.

It was to this old conspiratorial organization that two old friends belonged who met at this conference in the Petrograd mansion—Yakov Sverdlov and Filipp Goloshchekin. Here he is in a photograph, Comrade Filipp. He is already over forty. By the standards of the revolution he is already an old man—a face flaccid from sleepless nights and bad food. And, of course, bearded. They all were—Lenin, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Kamenev.… Goloshchekin had been studying to become a dentist, but he became a professional revolutionary instead: conspiratorial apartments, party cells. His most recent nom de guerre, Filipp, became his name. He had been a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee since 1912. In 1913, while Nicholas was celebrating the tricentennial of the dynasty, Goloshchekin was captured by the police and sent to the Turukhansk region, where he met another prominent Bolshevik in exile, Yakov Sverdlov. “Sverdlov and Goloshchekin were linked not only by a commonality of views but also by personal friendship,” Sverdlov’s wife wrote in her memoirs. Both friends were freed from Turukhansk in February 1917.

After the conference in Kschessinska’s palace the head of the Ural Bolsheviks, Sverdlov, was left in Petrograd to become secretary of the Central Committee. Replacing Sverdlov in the Urals was his old friend Comrade Filipp.

As leader of the Ural Bolsheviks, Goloshchekin set out for Ekaterinburg to organize a new revolution.

At that time, in April 1917, Lenin declared they would take power by peaceful means. By July, though, the Bolsheviks were already flexing their muscle: the Kronstadt sailors entered Petrograd. But the July demonstration was put down, and Lenin declared Kerensky’s government an organ of the victorious counterrevolution and the Soviets a “fig leaf” concealing the power of the bourgeoisie. Lenin was beginning to prepare for an armed uprising.

The Provisional Government initiated a judicial inquiry: the Bolsheviks were accused of mutiny and of receiving money from Russia’s enemy, Germany. But Lenin and his closest comrade-in-arms, Zinoviev, refused to appear at the trial and hid. And although many leading Bolsheviks were arrested, the party was not banned, and three hundred party members participated in the next Bolshevik congress.

Commander-in-chief General Kornilov attempted to avert a seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. He demanded from Kerensky full authority to bring order to the rear and the front. General Krymov’s Cavalry Corps had advanced toward Petrograd.

Kerensky removed Kornilov and turned to