The Trust - Part II: Yakushev

Aleksandr A. Yakushev was born on 7 August 1876 in the town of Tver, a sleepy provincial capital north of Moscow. A graduate of the Imperial Alexandrovsky Lycee in St. Petersburg, the young Yakushev forewent an early foray into government service in favour of remaining at the Lycee in the capacity of a tutor for the younger class of students. Utilizing the connections he made as counsellor to the offspring of the governing class, Yakushev was able to eventually procure a post in the Ministry of Waterways. By the time of the Bolshevik revolution, the rising bureaucrat had reached the position of actual state councillor in the old Tsarist table of ranks - the same position reached by Lenin's father, Alexander Ulyanov.
The Revolution, however, shattered the orderly and privileged existence of Yakushev and countless thousands of other Tsarist officials. It represented both a political event of profound historical significance as well as the end of a way of life. The Soviet author, Lev Nikulin, describes Yakushev's response to this new reality thus: "Revolution! What right did they have to take away from him his place in the world, a brilliant future, a general's rank, a comfortable state apartment, to smash his career, which he created for decades, and to destroy the state with which he had been connected his whole life?" This view was undoubtedly shared by thousands of other civil servants. Many of them fled to the West to eke out a furtive existence among the ranks of the other emigres. Others chose to remain in Russia, electing to either serve their new Bolshevik master or to pursue the life of an underground opponent of the regime. Other, such as Yakushev, would choose both.
Accounts differ as to the nature and timing of Yakushev's conspiratorial work in the monarchist underground. A former Polish intelligence official claims that Yakushev was approached by Trotsky personally to take up responsibilities in the new Commissariat of Communications as the head of the Department of Waterway, where he subsequently became involved in the MOTsR. A Soviet source, however, presents a more roundabout route. After a futile attempt in organizing underground counter-revolutionary cells in Petrograd, Yakushev fled in late 1919 to Moscow, where he lived on his own meager savings and what money he could acquire throught the sale of silverware and china in the black markets of the capital. Instead of Trotsky, it was a former associate who finally convinced Yakushev that his talents were better served in taking up a position in the new administration. Despite being accepted for a high ranking post in the aforesaid commissariat, Yakushev remained an inveterate monarchist and Russian nationalist. At about this same time he also entered into the clandestine MOTsR, becoming one of its key members.