In the one and a half year epic of the arrest, exile and execution of the royal family, there is a mysterious episode that went down in history as "Yakovlev's adventure." Now, when much that has remained secret for decades is becoming clear, it is possible to shed light on this page of history that is still a mystery to the general reader, and on the fate of its protagonist Vasily Vasilyevich Yakovlev …
On April 22, 1918, an armed detachment entered provincial Tobolsk. Having paraded along Svoboda Street past the governor's house, where the imperial family was held under arrest, the detachment stopped near the house of the rich Siberian industrialists Korniliev, and immediately three of the newcomers went to the city council. To its head, the former Baltic sailor P. Khokhryakov, they introduced themselves as D. Chudinov - the head of the detachment, G. Zentsov - his deputy and V. Yakovlev - a special representative of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. By presenting the appropriate mandate signed by Y. Sverdlov, V. Avanesov and I. Steinberg. Yakovlev, a tall, thin man with a clean-shaven face, dressed in a semi-officer's uniform, told Khokhryakov that he had the authority to take the royal family from Tobolsk and that all local authorities should unquestioningly carry out his orders and orders …
The next morning, the special representative paid a visit to the governor's house to introduce himself to the august prisoners. He shook hands with Nicholas Alexandrovich, gallantly bowed to the princesses, visited the room where the sick prince lay, went to meet the queen who was late for the exit. “He entered, shaved face, smiling and embarrassed, asked if I was satisfied with the security and the premises,” the emperor wrote in his diary about this meeting. “Today, after breakfast, Yakovlev came with Kobylinsky and announced that he had received an order to take me away, without saying where,” the tsar wrote down the next day. - Alike decided to go with me and take Maria; it was not worth protesting … Now they began to pack the most necessary things. Then Yakovlev said that he would return for Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia and Alexei and that, probably, we would see them in three weeks”…
On the morning of April 26, Siberian koshevs and tarantas were brought to the governor's house: the snow on the road did not melt in places, and in some places the ground was bare, and therefore transport could be needed both toboggan and wheeled. In the first three tarantases sat the gunners and machine gunners, followed by a carriage with Nikolai and Yakovlev, then in a spacious carriage on soft seats the tsarina and princess Maria, the carriages with the entourage. The convoy group was at the rear of the column.
At six o'clock in the morning, still in the dark, a column of twenty carriages set off. We crossed the Irtysh on the ice already covered with melt water. “The coachmen are booming. The horses are flying with an arrow. Just look, you will fly out of the tarantass or out of the saddle. We must hold on firmly. On the road, in some places it is mud, then snow,”- later recalled one of the participants in this unusual raid. Ninety versts from Tobolsk - the first halt and a change of carriages. And again the race. The first night was spent in the village of Ievleve at the confluence of the Tavda and the Tobol. On the morning of April 27, we crossed Tobol, passed the village of Pokrovskoye, stopping near the house of the “holy elder” - Grigory Rasputin - and at 10 pm, having overcome 280 versts, arrived in Tyumen. By this time, the locomotive had brought a train of six cars to the platform of the Tyumensky railway station - the extraordinary train No. 42 of the Samara-Zlatoust railway. Boarding began immediately, and two hours later, members of the royal family, entourage, servants and guards settled in the compartment, and silence reigned on the train.
Royal prisoners: Nicholas II, Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria.
The chairman of the Tyumen provincial executive committee N. Nemtsov entered the train, negotiates something with Yakovlev, and both of them are heading to the telegraph office. After a while, the Special Representative returns alone and, walking through the cars, informs the guards in an undertone that an order has been received from Moscow: to go not to Yekaterinburg, as everyone thought, but to Moscow via Omsk, Chelyabinsk and Samara …
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On April 28, at 5 o'clock in the morning, the locomotive quietly moves off the train, and the train goes to Omsk. An hour later, the person on duty at the Ural Council in Yekaterinburg, having not received the agreed notice of exit No. 42 to Yekaterinburg, informed the members of the Council about this. By 10 am it became clear that Yakovlev had violated the action plan agreed with the Council. The Presidium of the Executive Committee by telegraph called on everyone to prevent the crime conceived by Yakovlev, and the Council declares him a traitor to the cause of the revolution and makes him outlawed.
Upon learning that the persecution has begun. Yakovlev at the Lyubinskaya station uncouples a steam locomotive with one car and, leaving the train under the protection of his detachment, rushes to Omsk. Here, representatives of the Soviet government persuade him to change his mind and return to Yekaterinburg, and he seeks the opportunity to talk with Moscow. In a conversation with Sverdlov, he states that his passengers and the detachment are under the threat of reprisals, and asks for permission to hide the Romanovs "in a suitable place." Sverdlov does not agree to this and orders the special representative to go to Yekaterinburg and hand over the royal family to the Ural authorities. Returning to the train left in Lyubinskaya, Yakovlev ordered to return to Tyumen, and from there to Yekaterinburg …
At this time, in the Ural Council, passions around the unauthorized change of the route heated up to such an extent that some members of the Council demanded the immediate arrest of Yakovlev and a search of train No. 42. But the leadership confined itself to calling a special representative for explanations. He was confident, even impudent. He said that on the way he suspected the possibility of an assassination attempt on the Romanovs, and since the All-Russian Central Executive Committee ordered him to protect the life of the royal family by all available means, he decided to take it away in a different direction and "hide it in a suitable place until the situation is clarified." In confirmation of his words, he presented a tape of telegraphic negotiations with Sverdlov. The Council decided to place the Romanovs under reliable protection in Yekaterinburg, and let Yakovlev go to Moscow: "Let them deal with him there themselves."
Possible escape routes. By sledging, Yakovlev brought the royal family from Tobolsk to Tyumen, but instead of following to Yekaterinburg, Yakovlev turned east to Omsk. If the Yekaterinburg Bolsheviks had not intercepted him halfway, he could have followed from Omsk to the east through Novonikolaevsk, to the south through Barnaul or by a roundabout route through Kurgan, Chelyabinsk, Simbirsk to Moscow.
The first thing that Yakovlev did when he arrived in Moscow was to send a telegram to his assistants in Tobolsk: “Gather a detachment. Leave. I surrendered my credentials. I am not responsible for the consequences. Yakovlev . He was soon assigned to the Eastern Front and disappeared in October 1918! There were rumors that he went over to the Kolchakites and disappeared in the depths of the emigration …
Yakovlev's "adventure" was preceded by a nine-month "sitting" of the Romanovs in Tobolsk, which gave the Soviet authorities in the center and in the localities a lot of trouble and anxiety. From all sides, the Bolsheviks heard rumors about monarchist conspiracies nesting around Tobolsk, supposedly aimed at freeing the royal family. By the spring of 1918, the situation escalated to such an extent that the then secretary of the Ural Gubkom of the party, Shaya Goloschekin, specially arrived in Moscow to demand that the Romanov family be transported to another more reliable place at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Presidium. Based on this speech, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decided: to prepare an open trial on charges of Nikolai Romanov of crimes against the country and the people; transport his family from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg and appoint for this purpose a specially authorized All-Russian Central Executive Committee,which should work in contact and under the control of the Ural Council. Soon the name of the specially authorized representative was named - Vasily Vasilievich Yakovlev, whose personality and motives for actions still remain unclear to most foreign and domestic historians.
Yakovlev spent only a week next to the royal family, and how many romantic legends and rumors this stay gave rise to! The roots of these legends were laid, paradoxically, by the members of the royal family themselves. "This is a good person," said Alexandra Feodorovna about Yakovlev, "kind people sent him to us, he wants us well." Nikolai Aleksandrovich himself echoed her: "He is a good man, straightforward, I like him." Witnesses who saw Yakovlev's treatment of the august captives showed that on the part of Yakovlev it was possible to observe a very courteous, even respectful attitude towards the former reigning persons. When speaking with the emperor, he kept his hand on the hat, and even called his supervised "Highnesses" and "Majesties." All this, according to one of the royal entourage, testified that “this person is not at all the samefor whom he claims to be. " But who is he?
In the strange behavior of the Moscow emissary, Nikolai Alexandrovich saw a saving turn of the case for himself. According to the investigator Sokolov, appointed by Kolchak to investigate the circumstances of the killing of the royal family, the tsar considered Yakovlev to be a German agent who, posing as a Bolshevik, carried out the task assigned to him: to deliver the Romanov family to the Soviet-German demarcation line and there to transfer it to the Kaiser occupation troops.
This conjecture by Sokolov gave an impetus to the creation of a real "Yakovlev cult" in the Western press. What motives did not explain here his "adventure". For example, the German historian Hoyer put forward the idea that Yakovlev, who at first hated the Tsar, having met Nicholas and his family members personally, felt sincere sympathy for them; his conscience began to speak in him, and he turned from a persecutor into an admirer who decided to violate the categorical order of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. Hoyer's colleagues, who did not want to believe in the miraculous treatment of the Bolshevik commissar, were more inclined to believe that the Kaiser's secret service was acting here in the person of Yakovlev, which managed to introduce its agent into the Bolshevik power structures and extended its operations all the way to Tobolsk.
The American author V. Alexandrov went even further. "The mysterious Yakovlev was a double agent in the British service," he wrote, referring to the testimony of a former Intelligence Service employee, William de Coue. After the First World War, this intelligence ace claimed that it was the British secret service who sent their resident Yakovlev to Russia in 1917 "with a Canadian passport in his pocket and with a quasi-revolutionary Socialist-Revolutionary reputation on the political account." Aleksandrov even agrees that Yakovlev can be put on a par with Sydney Reilly, Lockhart, Cromie and Crawford, "these brilliant agents of the secret service in Russia, in terms of the complexity of tasks, audacity of actions and depth of penetration."
More reliable information about Vasily Yakovlev was presented in his book "Twenty-Three Steps Down" by the Russian author M. Kasvinov, who published his fairly complete work in the pre-perestroika years. He claims that Yakovlev was born around 1885. According to some sources, he is a native of Ufa, Konstantin Myachin, according to others - from Kiev Moskvin, according to the third - from Riga Zarin. Compiled from these various sources, Yakovlev's biography looks like a detective story. Having started as a terrorist and expropriator, Yakovlev was supposedly drafted into the navy and ended up in an electrical engineering school in Sveaborg. In the 1905 revolution he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, participated in the uprising of sailors in the Baltic and was sentenced to be shot. He fled abroad and spent twelve years, first in Germany, and then in Canada. In March 1917, he arrived in Russia via Stockholm and immediately fell under the tutelage of the famous Socialist-Revolutionary activist and writer Mstislavsky in the library of the General Staff. Until October 1917, Yakovlev was allegedly often seen next to Savinkov, Colonel Muravyov, who later rebelled and was shot dead by the Bolshevik Vareikis on the Eastern Front, the People's Commissar of Justice, the Left SR Steinberg. “It is not entirely clear how in the spring of 1918 Yakovlev found himself specially authorized by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee,” writes Kasvinov, “but in the turbulent atmosphere of that time, and even with the assistance of such adventurous politicians as the Left Socialist-Revolutionary leaders such as M. A. Spiridonova, B. D. Kamkov and I. 3. Steinberg, similar careerist ups on the crest of the revolutionary wave happened "…Until October 1917, Yakovlev was allegedly often seen next to Savinkov, Colonel Muravyov, who later rebelled and was shot dead by the Bolshevik Vareikis on the Eastern Front, the People's Commissar of Justice, the Left SR Steinberg. “It is not entirely clear how in the spring of 1918 Yakovlev found himself specially authorized by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee,” writes Kasvinov, “but in the turbulent atmosphere of that time, and even with the assistance of such adventurous politicians as the Left Socialist-Revolutionary leaders such as M. A. Spiridonova, B. D. Kamkov and I. 3. Steinberg, similar careerist ups on the crest of the revolutionary wave happened "…Until October 1917, Yakovlev was allegedly often seen next to Savinkov, Colonel Muravyov, who later rebelled and was shot dead by the Bolshevik Vareikis on the Eastern Front, the People's Commissar of Justice, the Left SR Steinberg. “It is not entirely clear how in the spring of 1918 Yakovlev found himself specially authorized by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee,” writes Kasvinov, “but in the turbulent atmosphere of that time, and even with the assistance of such adventurous politicians as the Left Socialist-Revolutionary leaders such as M. A. Spiridonova, B. D. Kamkov and I. 3. Steinberg, similar careerist ups on the crest of the revolutionary wave happened "…how in the spring of 1918 Yakovlev found himself specially authorized by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Kasvinov writes, but in the turbulent atmosphere of that time, and even with the assistance of such adventurous politicians as the Left Socialist-Revolutionary leaders like M. A. Spiridonova, B. D. Kamkov and I. 3. Steinberg, similar careerist ups on the crest of the revolutionary wave happened "…how in the spring of 1918 Yakovlev found himself specially authorized by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Kasvinov writes, but in the turbulent atmosphere of that time, and even with the assistance of such adventurous politicians as the Left Socialist-Revolutionary leaders like M. A. Spiridonova, B. D. Kamkov and I. 3. Steinberg, similar careerist ups on the crest of the revolutionary wave happened "…
Yekaterinburg Bolsheviks who decided the fate of the royal family. From left to right: Shaya Goloshchekin, Yankel Vaisbard, Georgy Safarov (Woldin), Tolmachev.
After the failure of the "adventure" and disappearance on the Eastern Front, Yakovlev emerged on the side of the Whites. He appeared in a number of White Guard newspapers with a series of articles in which he repented of his Bolshevik sins. But, as Kasvinov writes, this did not save him. “On December 30, 1918, by order of the counterintelligence colonel Kletsandy, Yakovlev was arrested and sent to Kolchak's headquarters. Here he ended up with Colonel Zaichek, the White Bohemian chief of the counterintelligence detachment at the headquarters of the "supreme ruler", a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian army. From the hands of the latter, he did not leave alive "…
But, as the famous journalist German Nazarov found out, Vasily Yakovlev did not die in the dungeons of Kolchak's counterintelligence!
Author - German Nazarov
