The Race to Save the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport

Author:Helen Rappaport
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 10

‘The Baggage Will Be in Utter Danger at All Times’

In the entire Romanov story there is no more enigmatic, elusive figure than Vasily Yakovlev. Debate has never ceased on his motives and whether or not he tried to subvert his mission and save the Romanovs. Whose side was Yakovlev really on? Was he a true and dedicated revolutionary, a loyal Bolshevik who followed to the letter his orders from Sverdlov? Or was he a secret monarchist who took matters into his own hands in order to try and get the Romanovs to safety? There has even been a third option, suggested by Victor Alexandrov and Summers and Mangold, among others, that he was a British agent sent on a dangerous rescue mission.1

In the light of the greater availability of documentary evidence from Russia, this last suggestion now seems absurd. There are, however, still some who persist in claiming that Yakovlev was a double agent working for the German High Command, who had come to take the Romanovs out to a German-occupied area of Russia and from there to safety. It is further alleged that this was all at the insistence of Count Mirbach, the German ambassador in Moscow. This has been a favoured argument in Russia since the Sokolov investigation into the Romanov murders published in 1925, perpetuated in the accounts of Bulygin, Kerensky, Melgunov and others. But according to the German historian and archivist Kurt Jagow, who made a close study of official German papers relating to the Romanov matter, the story is a ‘fantasy’, ‘based solely on circumstantial evidence, which does not stand up to closer examination’.2 There is simply no documentary trace of a serious German attempt to rescue the Romanovs in 1918, let alone one involving a high-level Bolshevik commissar at the behest of Mirbach.

Over the years the amount of speculation about, and mystification of, Yakovlev’s role – much of it based on little or no hard evidence – has served only to unnecessarily overcomplicate the story of what happened after Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria left the Governor’s House in the early morning of 26 April 1918. At this point, the Bolshevik government had not yet made a final decision about what they were going to do with them. But one thing had already been made clear: it was Yakovlev’s task to ensure that they did not fall into the hands of one or other group of renegade Urals hardliners, out to wrest control of the Imperial Family and administer their own summary rough justice.

There has been considerable debate about whether Lenin wanted to use the Romanovs in a ransom trade-off between the British and the Germans – the figure of £500,000 has been much bandied about – involving mediation by the shadowy figure of the British spy Sidney Reilly. Reilly, the archetypal daredevil spook, seems to pop up with alarming regularity in various undercover plots involving Russia in World War I, but any claims that he had a role in such a mission were efficiently demolished by Andrew Cook in his biography of Reilly, Ace of Spies, in 2004.

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