Vasily Vasilyevich Yakovlev (; 16 September 1938) was a Russian (of Latvian ancestry) Old Bolshevik revolutionary and politician. He participated in the October Revolution of 1917; transferred former Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family to Yekaterinburg, where they were later killed; rose to become a commander in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War; fled to China after being captured by the White Army, where he became a government advisor; and returned to the Soviet Union in 1928, where he was eventually arrested and executed. Yakovlev was portrayed by the actor Ian Holm in the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra.
Political career
Vasily Yakovlev was born Konstantin Alekseyevich Mâčin on in Sharlyk to the family of Aleksey Mâčin, a Latvian engineer. In 1901 he was recruited as a sailor and studied electrical engineering in Helsinki, where in 1905 he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and participated in an uprising of sailors. After being sentenced to death in absentia by a military court, he went into hiding under the name Vasily Vasilyevich Yakovlev.
He participated in many acts of sabotage and terrorism, including an armed train robbery through which he seized approximately 1.5 pounds of gold, which was invested into the Party. He managed to escape to Brussels, Belgium, where he worked as an electrician. He was active in Party causes there, and briefly lived in Canada and Germany. After the February Revolution of 1917, in March he returned to Russia through Stockholm. He was an active member of the Petrograd Soviet, of which he became a deputy commander and a military librarian.
During the October Revolution of 1917 he participated in the capture of the Winter Palace, after which he became the commissioner of the central telephone exchange of Petrograd, and was also a delegate at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
Last days of the Tsar
In March 1918 he was appointed by the Central Executive Committee to oversee the transfer of former Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family from Tobolsk to Omsk (or Moscow according to other sources), where Nicholas was to be put on trial. The train departed on April 17 but due to the advancement of White Army soldiers loyal to Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, who were blockading the railway as part of the ongoing civil war, orders from Moscow led to Yakovlev diverting the train to Yekaterinburg instead, where it arrived on April 30. The family were then seized by the Ural Regional Soviet and held prisoner in the Ipatiev House until July 17, when they and four retainers were executed.
The above account contradicts that in Robert Massie's book Nicholas and Alexandra, which states that Yakovlev defected from the Bolsheviks and joined the White armies. It describes Yakovlev as being motivated by the desire to save the Imperial family to the extent that he was following his orders, which were to take the family to Moscow.
In Massie's account, Yakovlev arrived at Tobolsk on 22 April, accompanied by one hundred and fifty horsemen and his own private telegraph operator, through whom he could communicate directly with the Kremlin. He carried documents that stated that he should be cooperated with fully, on pain of death. He showed these documents to Eugene Kobylinsky, the officer in charge at Tobolsk. On 25 April, Yakovlev informed Kobylinsky that his mission was to take the Imperial family away from Tobolsk. He did not say at that stage that he was going to take them to Moscow, but those were his orders. However, Yakovlev soon found that Alexei, formerly the heir to the throne, was seriously ill. He communicated this to Moscow, and was told to only take Nicholas. Alexandra, the former empress, decided to go with Nicholas, accompanied by her daughter Maria.