An answer is offered by the Soviet organ, of the 4th May, 1918. It explains that it was “owing to alleged indications of efforts being made by local peasants and by Monarchist groups to promote escape.” We trace here the handiwork of Soloviev and Vasiliev. And it adds: “The regional Soviet of the Urals are charged with surveillance over the Imperial family” (_The London Times_, May 6, 1918). But while this answer goes a certain way, and definitely involves the responsibility of the Moscow government for all that happened in the Urals, it by no means tells the whole truth. The inside history of Yakovlev’s mission has been explained. Yakovlev was the agent of Sverdlov. But Sverdlov as president of the Tsik[13] was over the foreign as well as the domestic affairs of Sovietdom, being in fact Prime Minister. Now Sverdlov had been a paid agent of Germany and was still in the closest touch and relationship with Mirbach. The Tsar’s own definition of Yakovlev’s mission was unquestionably right, in substance, if not in detail: to obtain his endorsement of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Soviet organs published long accounts of Yakovlev’s journey. In these he is falsely described as the representative of the Sovnarkom, i.e., of Lenin’s parliament. That was merely to cover up the tracks. Yakovlev is quoted as speaking of Nicholas Romanov as a pleasant enough person, but of “extraordinarily limited intellect.” He was not clever enough to realise the advantages that were offered to him. The Germans, of course, were extremely displeased by this _contretemps_, more especially as it came in conjunction with the failure of their plan to nobble the Russian _intelligentzia_ and with their aid to set up the “new government” that Ludendorff craved. One of Mirbach’s chief assistants, a Dr. Ritzler, then remarked to one of these Russians that “the Bolsheviks were still necessary.” A few months later the Red terror avenged the slight inflicted upon the German associates of Sverdlov. Voikov, the Jew, boasted to his “lady” friends in Ekaterinburg after the murder that “the world will never know what we did with the bodies.” It was his accomplices that suggested to the remorse-stricken Fesenko that the “cinders were not there.” The insolent confidence in the superiority of their “precautions” displayed by Voikov is characteristic of his race. The murderers invented another story in Perm, of which I have not yet spoken. Their agents gave information that one of the Grand Duchesses had been seen in the city and that she had been shot during the Terror some months after the “execution” [Illustration: “FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH”