Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [149]
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.
WHO WAS HE?
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