The Trust - Part I: The Emigre Tangle

The anti-Bolshevik forces which fled Russia following the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, constituted a confused knot of mutually antagonist elements. Some of these antagonisms were based upon profound ideological differences, while others were the result of personality conflicts among the various factional groupings. Overall, the main ideological difference consisted of those emigres who supported the February revolution and those who were opposed to any of the revolutions which had occurred in Russia. In the ranks of the former were to be found diverse Social-Revolutionary factions, liberals of various hues, populists and even anarchists. Among the latter were the monarchists, White officers, and conservatives.
Despite their common opposition to social revolution, mutual antagonisms had led to a schism between the White generals on one side and the conservative monarchists on the other. In the former camp, pride of place was afforded to Baron Petr Wrangel - the last Supreme Commander of the United Russian Army (ORA) during the Civil War. After the destruction of the last White redoubt in the Crimea in 1921, Wrangel's forces fled first to Gallipoli and then to the Balkans. But throughout the retreat, evacuation and exile, Wrangel kept his army together through either force of will of threat of penalty. His efforts and his character endeared him to his troops and he remained the single most popular leader among the White emigres.
Ensconced in Serbia, Wrangel desperately tried to preserve the nucleus of the ORA, preparing it for the day, when, in combination with a renewed Western military intervention, it could march once again into battle with the Bolsheviks and take part in the liberation of Russia. Nor was he alone in this view. Over one million Russians had fled to the West and most of them believed their sojourn would be temporary: either the Bolsheviks would collapse from within or they would be overthrown from without. In either case, their hold on Russia would not be permanent. Eventually, the rightful rulers of Russia would return.
But where Wrangel would differ with many of the other White leaders was in how he envisioned the new Russia, which would replace the Bolshevik republic. Alone among the White generals, Wrangel had realized very early on that the old Russia was dead. Desperately, he had tried to impress upon Denikin - the former head of the White forces in Southern Russia during the Civil War - that unless the Whites recognized the great changes that had taken place since the Revolution, they were bound to lose the war. Instead, Denikin and his officers pursued the conflict with the intention of impressing the old structure of the Russian state upon its now shattered foundations. The results were predictable. The peasants, who only recently seized control of the land, took up arms against their returning landlords. The Cossacks and Ukrainians refused their support in the pervasive rhetoric of Great Russian chauvinism. The workers and the Jews...well...they were simply the minions of "the Forces of Darkness" - in the opinion of the Whites - and thus were deserving of repression.
Because of the above mentioned policies, when the decisive battle of Orel was fought in October 1919, the entire rear of the White army was ablaze in discontent. Thousands of troops had to be removed from the front in order to protect the supply lines and to serve garrison duty. The remaining front line troops, now outnumbered two-to-one, quickly broke under the hammer blows of the Red cavalry and Lenin's Lettish brigade, and soon the entire edifice of White power collapsed - and with it the last hope to win the Civil War. For Wrangel, the lesson was simple: "it was impossible to win over Russia. The population has come to hate us." He thereupon championed a new White policy, which recognized the peasant land expropriations, workers' rights and autonomy for Russia's minorities. But this 'leftist policy with rightist hands,' on the part of Wrangel's ORA, was opposed by the other major right-wing organization among the White emigres - the Supreme Monarchist Council (Vysshe monarkhicheskii soviet - VMS).
The VMS, which had its headquarters in Berlin, was lead by Nikolai Ye. Markov, the former head of the Monarchist party in the State Duma. Despite its lofty name, the Council was a fractious association. Younger monarchists, for instance, resented the control their elders had over the council. More serious, however, was a growing split between those monarchists, who supported the claim of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich - the murdered Tsar Nicholas II's uncle - to the now vacant Romanov throne, and those who supported Nicholas' cousin - Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich. The latter's support of the February revolution, however, was not forgotten by many monarchists, and it severely weakened his support. Despite these differences, the monarchists of the VMS did share several fundamental values, including the full restoration of the monarchy, the abolition of political parties, the return of expropriated land, and the inviolability of the Empire's borders.
Unable to mount any effective opposition to Lenin's regime with their own meager resources, the various White organizations continually lobbied Western governments for military intervention against the Bolsheviks, for financial support, and for an economic cordon to be placed around the Bolshevik state. In exchange, they often supplied intelligence material to these same governments, utilizing the numerous clandestine contacts they still maintained within the Motherland. They also supported various incursions conducted by guerrilla fighters and partisans, which operated in Western Belorussia and the Western Ukraine, as well as terrorist attacks and assassinations against Soviet officials. In this capacity, they presented a continuous external threat to Lenin and his regime.
But despite these actions on the part of the vanquished and the exiled, most of the monarchists by the fall of 1921 had started to place their greatest hopes upon the idea that somehow the Bolshevik regime would collapse from within, either through its own incompetence or though some sort of national revolt, or both. Although a million or more monarchists and other conservative opponents had fled, even more remained unable to flee for a variety of reasons. Many of these persons had been pressed into service by the Bolshevik state. Lacking trained administrators, the new rulers of Russia had to rely upon the services of their former enemies - under proper supervision of course. Many of these officials, however, remained inveterately hostile to the Bolsheviks and, coupled with the actual day-to-day control they possessed over large parts of the economic and political machinery of state, they constituted a significant internal threat to Lenin's government.
It was not surprising, therefore, that when rumours began to spread in the autumn of 1921, that a new underground monarchist organization had sprung up within the Soviet Union, many emigres sat up and took notice. The organization was known as the Monarchist Association of Central Russia (Monarkhicheskoe ob'yedinenie Tsentral'noi Rossii - MOTsR) and it would monopolize monarchist hopes and dreams for the next five years. And with these hopes would be connected one man - Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Yakovlev - a man whose background and personality made him an unlikely participant of the tragic events which follow.