When Yakovlev failed to remove the Tsarevich from Tobolsk and to “convert” the Tsar, he disappointed Mirbach more than he disappointed Sverdlov. The Jews feared the Russians, but the Germans wanted to use them. The Red Tsar planned to exterminate the Romanovs, but the Red Kaiser proposed to reinstate Nicholas. For a time their respective schemes assumed divergent courses; in the end, Wilhelm’s agents realised that they could not dissociate themselves from the Red Tsar, and it was the latter’s plan that prevailed. But, morally as well as practically, the German hand which had brought the Jew murderers into Russia controlled and directed the assassins’ work. Only when Berlin realised that the Romanovs were irrevocably on the side of the Entente did they release the hands of the murderers. The proposal that Yakovlev brought to Tobolsk was much more insidious than the Tsar understood it to be. Nicholas was not only to endorse the peace concluded at Brest; he was to seize the reins of power with the help of German bayonets and to give his only son to be a lawful Tsar under German tutelage. This meant the intervention of Russia in the war again, but on the German side. The Red Kaiser and his staff did not trust their Red agents any more. While Yakovlev went to Tobolsk as envoy extraordinary of the Tsik (but in reality of the German G.H.Q.) the official representative of Germany to the Soviet Government, with which she was in treaty and in virtual alliance, was summoning a secret conference of Anti-Soviet Russians to arrange for the advent of the “new government” desired by Ludendorff. It was a very pretty scheme, quite on German lines. But it failed at every point. The Germans once more had shown a total incapacity to understand human nature. Nicholas scorned the base overtures; the Russian _intelligentsia_ displayed, on this occasion, a sound understanding of their duties and interests.[15] The illness of Alexis was another obstacle, though in itself it made no difference. Sverdlov was not disturbed by Yakovlev’s failure to bring Nicholas and Alexis to Moscow. He had his agents everywhere. While Soloviev acted as watch-dog over the captives of Tobolsk so that no stranger to German plans should spirit them away, innumerable Red Solovievs hemmed the captives in. The common herd of the Soviets knew nothing, of course. The strings were cunningly, discreetly pulled from Moscow according to the best methods of Potsdam and the Wilhelmstrasse.