A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

The situation of the former royals took a turn for the worse in the early months of 1918. They noticed it in the growing rudeness of their guards, increased restrictions on their movements and the disappearance of luxuries, such as butter and coffee, which up until now they had taken for granted. The changes were connected with developments in the nearby industrial city of Ekaterinburg. A Soviet Congress of the Urals Region held there in February had elected a Bolshevik presidium led by Fillip Goloshchekin, a veteran Bolshevik and friend of Sverdlov. The Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks were well known for their militancy. They were hostile to the relative comfort in which the Tsar had so far been held and were determined to get him transferred to their own control — some with a view to his imprisonment, others with a view to his execution.

Goloshchekin pleaded with Sverdlov to let him have the Tsar, claiming that in Tobolsk the danger was greater that he might escape. There were rumours of various monarchist plots — some of them real, some imagined, and some invented — to liberate the imperial family. Sverdlov did not say no — the Urals' Bolsheviks were not the sort to mess around — but in fact there was a secret plan, ordered by the Central Committee, to bring the Tsar back to Moscow,

* The refusal of the British royal family to visit Russia for the next seventy-five years because of the murder of the Romanovs may thus seem to many readers to contain a large dose of typical British hypocrisy.

where Trotsky was planning a great show trial for him, in the manner of Louis XVI, with himself in the role of chief prosecutor. Trotsky proposed:

an open court that would unfold a picture of the entire reign (peasant policy, labour, nationalities, culture, the two wars, etc.). The proceedings would be broadcast to the nation by radio; in the villages accounts of the proceedings would be read and commented upon daily.⁸²

With this aim in mind, in early April Sverdlov ordered the commissar, Vasilii Yakovlev, to bring Nicholas and, if possible, the rest of his family back to Moscow alive.* Yakovlev was told to travel via Ekaterinburg so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Bolsheviks there who, if they found out his real mission, would have kidnapped and executed the former Tsar. Indeed, in April the Soviet of the Urals Region passed a resolution to that effect; and Zaslavsky, one of the Ekaterinburg commissars, prepared an ambush to kidnap the Tsar. 'We should not be wasting our time on the Romanovs,' Zaslavsky said to Yakovlev on his arrival in Tobolsk, 'we should be finishing them off.'⁸³

The journey from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg was to be full of risks. The spring thaw was just beginning, flooding the roads; and the Tsarevich, whose haemophilia had recently returned, was too sick to be moved. Yakovlev was told by Moscow to leave the rest of the family behind and set off with the ex-Tsar alone. But Alexandra would not be parted from Nicholas,+ and in the end the two of them set off together, minus four of the children (who would follow later), in open carts towards Tiumen, the nearest railway junction, 170 miles away. On the way they passed through Pokrovskoe, Rasputin's native village. Alexandra noted in her diary: 'stood long before our friend's house, saw his family & friends looking out of the windows at us'.⁸⁴

Once they had boarded the train at Tiumen, Yakovlev became suspicious of the local Bolsheviks. He had heard that a cavalry detachment was planning to attack the train on its way to Ekaterinburg and kidnap his royal charges — the 'cargo', as he referred to them in his coded messages to Moscow. So he went on a roundabout route via Omsk to the east. This strengthened the suspicions of the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks that he was planning to save the Tsar, perhaps

* Until recently the role of Yakovlev was something of a mystery. It was argued both that he was working for the Bolsheviks and that he was a White secret agent planning to rescue the imperial family. New evidence now puts his role as an agent of Moscow beyond dispute, although it is true that in July, whilst in command of the Second Red Army on the Eastern Front, he defected to the Whites (see Radzinsky, Last Tsar, ch. II).

+ The imperial couple were afraid that he would be taken to Moscow and forced to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The fact that they believed that the Bolsheviks should either need or want his signature for this is a telling sign of how far removed they had become from political reality (see Wilton, Last Days of the Romanovs, 206).