After the February Revolution of 1917, in March he returned to Russia through Stockholm. He was active in Party causes there, and briefly lived in Canada and Germany. He managed to escape to Brussels, Belgium, where he worked as an electrician. 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. After being sentenced to death in absentia by a military court, he went into hiding under the name Vasily Vasilyevich Yakovlev. 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. Vasily Yakovlev was born Konstantin Alekseyevich Mâčin on 29 August 1885 in Sharlyk to the family of Aleksey Mâčin, a Latvian engineer. Yakovlev was portrayed by the actor Ian Holm in the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra. 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. Vasily Vasilyevich Yakovlev ( Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Я́ковлев 29 August 1885 – 16 September 1938) was a Russian (of Latvian ancestry) Old Bolshevik revolutionary and politician. Location of the main events in the last days of Nicholas II and his family, who were held at Tobolsk from August 1917 to April 1918 before being transported to Ekaterinburg, where they were held for ten weeks before being murdered

Robert massie nicholas and alexandra