Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [136]
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