When Nicholas checked in his old diaries, he was surprised to find that he had paid Tobolsk a visit on his trip through Siberia in 1891. He had stayed in the town just a few hours and could remember nothing about it. It had been at a time, he discovered from his notes, when a French squadron was anchoring off Kronstadt.1
Although Kerensky had never been to Tobolsk, he knew it to have the advantages of a provincial capital with good telegraph links while remaining small, quiet and remote. With only a little over 20,000 inhabitants, it was a place where everyone knew what the neighbours were doing. Tobolsk had an appeal precisely because it was so distant from the big centres of population. Overlooked when the plans were drawn for the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, it lay over 150 miles to the north of the nearest station, which was in Tyumen. This was a definite advantage in the eyes of Kerensky, who wanted to eliminate the risk of a successful rescue. While cities like Ekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk had swollen with people and industry almost as soon as the first tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway were laid in the early 1890s, Tobolsk was much like the market town that it had become after Yermak and his Cossack force began the conquest of Siberia three centuries earlier. The great changes in economy and culture that were transforming key regions of the old empire had yet to make themselves felt there.2
The few foreigners who travelled to Tobolsk found it less than picturesque and less than comfortable. It had only two proper hotels. The streets were unpaved and the sewage system was primitive; when it rained, people had to use wooden boardwalks to avoid the mud.3 But in its old-fashioned way the town had a certain splendour, its cathedral rising high above the residential and commercial streets. There were more than twenty other churches with their neat, whitewashed walls and golden cupolas. Traders and priests bustled about. The age-old annual fur fair continued to be held as trappers brought their pelts to market and merchants haggled over prices. (Even so, there was growing competition from Tyumen to the south – and Tyumen had the advantage of being on the railway line.) The province had a settled population with scant contact with the wider world. The only newcomers were the 25,000 peasants who had trekked out from Russia and Ukraine under Prime Minister Pëtr Stolypin’s pre-war scheme to allow each of them to clear forty acres of forest or scrub land and start farmsteads without paying rent to landlords as they had done in their provinces of origin. They quickly built huts and sold fur, nuts and artisanal products while they built up their agricultural enterprises.4
There was no industry in the province because nobody had yet discovered any of the valuable minerals that were being mined elsewhere in Siberia. Agriculture was conducted in much the same way as in earlier centuries. The notable exception was the innovation in dairy production. The first butter factory was established in 1894 and by the start of the Great War there were 1,200 of them.5
The local authorities occasionally pondered how to bring the world to the town. Two of Russia’s mightiest rivers, the Irtysh and Tobol, met below the town’s great hill, from which point the waters flowed northward as the expanded River Irtysh until they reached the Arctic Ocean. The British had pioneered trading routes into northern Siberia from the late nineteenth century, and the steamer Louisa had arrived from Hull in 1876 with a shipment of iron, sugar and olive oil.6 Tobolsk’s elders had hoped that this would end the town’s isolation and enable economic modernization and growth. No one could doubt that the province’s forests would give stern competition to Swedish timber on the world market if only transport facilities could be established. The same was possible with livestock and fish catches. Iron was being found in the province’s southern parts around Tyumen, and the long-term economic prospects for west Siberia looked bright.7
Unfortunately for Tobolsk, the imperial government ignored the pleas of the Tobolsk authorities for help to enable vessels to steam down from the north and connect the province with Europe. Few ships apart from some Norwegian steamers plied regularly southwards to Tobolsk after the Louisa’s voyage – there was too little freight or passenger traffic to encourage other foreign companies to follow the precedent. Tobolsk remained almost unknown to the world outside Russia and its trade was overwhelmingly local or with other Russian towns, although the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway did at least lead to an increase in the movement of goods and people between Tobolsk and Tyumen. The rivers, however, remained the fastest mode of transport, as they had been for centuries. Climatic conditions in so northerly a latitude, however, made travel by boat impractical from November to the end of April, during which period the waters were vast sheets of ice. Throughout the long Siberian winter, Tobolsk was a snow-sealed municipality that could be reached only by horse-drawn sleigh or cart along the rutted north bank of the Tobol.8
The long, harsh winters and geographical isolation had made the town a perfect site for one of the Russian Empire’s largest prisons. Tobolsk Central was a depository for those convicted of revolutionary activity, and after the loss of Sakhalin Island in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905 it teemed with the additional prisoners who could no longer be held in detention off the Pacific coast.9 The prison visually dominated the main square along with the ‘five-headed’ cathedral and the local treasury. Inside the penal-labour facilities, discipline was ultra-strict and punishments were severe. Few inmates succeeded in escaping because multiple layers of high walling separated the cell blocks from the white outside walls.10 The harshness of conditions at Tobolsk Central increased after the 1905–1906 revolutionary emergency, and prison director Ivan Mogilëv gained a grim reputation for the penalties he meted out to prisoners who in any way defied him. Repeated lashings were the norm. After one collective protest he sentenced sixteen men to be hanged and buried in the prison. Tobolsk Central became notorious even by tsarist standards in the decade before the February 1917 Revolution as knowledge about the protests of inmates became known outside its walls.11
The town was also one of the traditional places of administrative exile.12 Indeed, many exiles chose to stay in Tobolsk even when their terms came to an end. Poles had been sent there in large numbers after the suppression of the national revolt in 1867, and the town retained a substantial Polish minority.13
When Nicholas II fell from power, the Provisional Government decreed amnesty for all political prisoners; common criminals too were released. Local jailers and policemen fled the area in panic. There were urban disturbances before calm was restored and the town returned to a more settled condition. Yet everyone remembered its penal history, and Kerensky understood that if Nicholas went to Tobolsk, it would look like his just desserts for the isolation and detention he had meted out to the enemies of the old order. This would be a political bonus for Kerensky, who could not afford to appear to be indulgent to the Romanovs. Even so, there was no intention of putting them in jail, far less to subject them to penal labour. On the contrary, the idea was to keep them in dignified circumstances, albeit not at the high level of the Alexander Palace. And they were to be protected from physical harm. This was why Tsarskoe Selo was no longer appropriate as a place of confinement. Kerensky knew from the report made by Vershinin and Makarov that Tobolsk was unusually quiet for a Russian town in the summer of 1917. Its only brush with ructious behaviour had been in earlier years when Rasputin, taking a break from the capital, had paid an extended visit. He got thunderously drunk night after night and propositioned a string of local women. He also secured the acceptance of a district overseer as a priest of the Orthodox Church; he even obtained the promotion of a Tobolsk ne’er-do-well called Varnava to a bishopric.14
This had come to seem like ancient history and the local political leaders were seeking to dissociate the town from Rasputin. The urban administration continued to function. Economically, Tobolsk was largely cut off from the rest of Russia, and its inhabitants were suffering less than people in Petrograd, Moscow and the other big industrial centres whose food supplies were depleted. Farmers brought their produce to the markets, troops were more orderly than they were elsewhere and the law was treated with respect. A soviet had been elected, but Bolsheviks were a negligible presence and Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks headed the labour movement in the town.
The Provisional Government had sound reason to believe that it had made a good choice when sending the Romanovs to Tobolsk. It is true that labour organizations outside Tobolsk distrusted Kerensky’s arrangements. Already on 18 August, when the family was on board the Tyumen–Tobolsk steamer, the Ekaterinburg District Soviet – not yet dominated by Bolsheviks – was expressing concern about the transfer. In a message to the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets in Petrograd, its leaders reported the spread of rumours that the Romanovs were really bound for Harbin across the Chinese border. The same soviet cabled other soviets along the Trans-Siberian Railway asking them to investigate the rumours and take whatever precautions were necessary.15 Ekaterinburg’s socialist leadership was hopelessly misinformed about the family’s whereabouts and direction of movement. But its message of complaint was a harbinger of later developments when regional soviets in both western Siberia and the Urals decided that Tobolsk could not be left to itself and intervened in the interests of the revolutionary security.
Kerensky was well aware that agencies of the labour movement ‘in the localities’ were capable of taking affairs into their own hands and flouting the prerogatives of his government. The Tsaritsyn Soviet, in the Volga region, declared itself an independent republic and called on other cities to challenge the cabinet in Petrograd. The Russian economy was in free fall as bank credit dried up, factories closed and peasants refused to release their grain stocks to the official procurement bodies. The normal apparatus of state power was disintegrating. The police no longer existed and desertions from the armed forces at the Eastern Front were becoming commonplace. Kerensky remained committed to the Allied cause – his fate was inextricably linked to an early defeat of Germany even if it was going to have to be achieved in northern France rather than Poland or Ukraine. For the moment he hoped that he had solved at least one of his problems by transporting Nicholas and his family to a distant provincial capital in western Siberia.