Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [150]
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