Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [151]
Of course, Yakovlev’s memoirs contain no reply to the most important question: When did he “overcome the idea of bolshevism”? If that happened after he went to get the tsar, then everything is clear.
But what if it was before?
Then his entire journey appears in an entirely new light. His softness, his heartfelt conversations, and, finally, the puzzling telegram the former grand duchesses received in Tobolsk with his signature: “We are traveling well. Christ be with you. How is Little One’s health. Yakovlev.” What an unlikely vocabulary for a Bolshevik! Of course, this was the tsar’s telegram. The last telegram of Nicholas II. Which Yakovlev sent over his own signature. A Bolshevik commissar sending the telegram of Nicholas the Bloody over his own signature?
Revolution is a time of little Napoleons. Perhaps this man with three names was playing his own, third game. There was Sverdlov’s game, there was Goloshchekin’s game, but there was also Yakovlev’s desperate game. Perhaps he never intended to take his train to Moscow after Omsk at all. An interesting note slipped into the tsaritsa’s diary:
“April 16 (29). In train.… The Omsk Soviet of Deputies does not let us go through Omsk since they are afraid they want to take us to Japan.”
Might there be some truth in this half-hint? Might the mysterious plenipotentiary have hinted only to her, the true head of the family, of his goal? Hence his behavior with the tsarist couple?
But the inevitable end awaited those who made the revolution. On September 16, 1938, the last companion of the last tsar, Yakovlev-Myachin-Stoyanovich, was arrested and disappeared forever into Stalin’s camps, taking his secret with him.
Chapter 12
THE LAST HOUSE
Above the town, on the highest hill, rose the Church of the Ascension. Next to the church a few houses formed Ascension Square.
One of these houses stood directly opposite the church—low-slung, white, with thick walls and a stone carving all the way across the facade, which was turned toward the boulevard and the church. One of the house’s thick sides dropped down a slope along blind Ascension Lane. Here the windows of the first half-cellar barely peeked out from below ground level.
One of these half-cellar windows was between two trees. This was the window of that very room to which we will find ourselves returning.
Driving up to the house, however, they saw none of this. The house was masked nearly to the roof by a very high fence. Only a bit of the uppermost part of the second-floor windows looked out.
Around the house stood the guard.
This house belonged to the engineer Ipatiev, an unlucky man. An influential member of the Soviet and also a graduate of the University of Geneva, Peter Voikov was the son of a mining engineer. He knew Ipatiev and had been in this house with the thick walls that was so conveniently situated (from the standpoint of guarding it).
That is why at the very end of April the engineer was called in to the Soviet of Deputies and ordered to clear out of his house in twenty-four hours. They promised “to return the house soon” (engineer Ipatiev did not understand the portent in this statement). He was ordered to leave all his furniture where it was and put his personal possessions into storage.
The cement storeroom was located on the first floor, next to a half-cellar room—the execution room.
Both cars drove along the fence to the plank gates.
The gates opened and the cars were allowed in. Neither Nicholas nor Alix nor their daughter would ever leave those gates alive.