Even the slimmest chance of liberation vanished on 26 March 1918, when, completely without warning, a 250-strong Red Guard detachment turned up in Tobolsk sent by the West Siberian Regional Soviet Executive Committee in Omsk.1 Pierre Gilliard feared the worst. The Omsk troops were noisy and obstreperous, and their hatred of the dynasty was expressed in rowdy behaviour.2 Alexandra refused to see things quite as bleakly as Gilliard and persuaded herself that some of new arrivals were monarchist officers in disguise, but this was speculation based on nothing more than hope: Gilliard was the one with an eye for hard reality.3
For hundreds of miles around Tobolsk, Omsk and Ekaterinburg were the two citadels of Bolshevism. Omsk was capital of the west Siberian region while Ekaterinburg was regional centre for the Urals, and there was much rivalry between them about the Romanov question.4 The central authorities had devolved authority in these matters to Omsk for the simple reason that Tobolsk was in the west Siberia region, but Ekaterinburg prided itself on having greater revolutionary élan and wanted to take charge of the situation. The Bolsheviks in both cities did, however, agree that the current situation was intolerable. From their point of view, Tobolsk was enemy territory. It still had a soviet headed by Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. The military detachment guarding the Romanovs had been put together from regiments that had served in Tsarskoe Selo. Kobylinski was an appointee of Kerensky and remained in post after Pankratov’s departure.5 Rumours were rife that the imperial family hoped to escape along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Japan. Their worry was that nobody in Tobolsk could be depended upon to stop them.6
While Ekaterinburg was debating about what to do, Omsk acted.7 The detachment’s head, Commissar V. D. Dutsman, arrived two days in advance of the main party and commandeered a room in the Kornilov house.8 He had not been expected or invited. A tall man with grey-blue eyes and an inscrutable countenance, he had the demeanour of someone who knew how to be ruthless in the revolutionary cause (and indeed it was apparently he who later signed the death warrant of Bishop Germogen).9 The other residents, moreover, looked askance at the fact that he was of Latvian-Jewish descent.10 In the ensuing days he totally failed to restrain the Red Guards who had followed him from Omsk under the command of Commissar A. D. Demyanov and his deputy, Degtyarëv. Demyanov was an expellee from an Orthodox Church seminary; Degtyarëv had once been a cavalry ensign and, in his time at St Petersburg University, had belonged to the arch-reactionary Union of Archangel Michael.11 Dutsman, Demyanov and Degtyarëv were a law unto themselves. A town that had avoided the turmoil of the big urban centres was plunged into chaos as the men from Omsk ran amok.
On 29 March 1918, they marched to Freedom House and confronted the guard detachment. At the risk of sparking an outbreak of violence, they demanded to enter the building.12 Nobody knew how to cope with them. Talks between the two detachments brought some calm to the situation but the atmosphere remained volatile.
It was a relief to the Freedom House inmates when Dutsman indicated that his main immediate priority was to bring the Tobolsk Soviet under Bolshevik control and place it at the apex of power in the town. All the other public institutions were to be either abolished or else subordinated to ‘soviet power’. Demyanov announced the closure of the old agencies of local government such as the town duma and the creation of a ‘council of the people’s economy’. It would not be enough to transform politics. Sleepy Tobolsk had to undergo the economic revolution that had started months earlier in other Russian urban centres.13 While this was happening, Dutsman saw no point in disrupting the work of Kobylinski. Instead, he got himself made secretary of the town soviet, where he spent nearly all his time. Kobylinski observed developments from a distance, though he, too, was not without traces of anti-Semitism and he later complained that Bolshevization served to hand dominant authority to Jews.14 But Dutsman left him alone, and Kobylinski did what he could to maintain a degree of tranquillity at Freedom House and shield the Romanovs from worrying as much as he himself did about the worsening situation.
Vladimir Kosarev, chairman of the West Siberian Regional Soviet Executive Committee, wrote to Lenin and Trotsky on 28 March 1918 from Omsk. It had been nearly two months since Sovnarkom had given him the duty to oversee Tobolsk politics. He had had his own local difficulties to resolve in Omsk before feeling able to dispatch a military detachment to Tobolsk, 400 miles away. Kosarev was a typical Bolshevik chieftain, brimming with revolutionary zeal and initiative, but Omsk’s Red Guards were now in charge of the town, and Kosarev kept in touch with Dutsman, Demyanov and Degtyarëv by telegraph. What he learned was enough to convince him that Lenin and Sverdlov had underestimated the dangers of the situation. Sovnarkom had demobilized the imperial army before deciding what was to take its place. The guard detachment at Freedom House were from that old army, and Kosarev’s solution was to replace it with troops from Omsk. He asked Lenin and Sverdlov to empower him to appoint fresh commissars and to inform those in post in Tobolsk to this effect.15
The scene in Tobolsk was even more turbulent than Kosarev could know from such a distance. More or less at the same time as his Omsk Red Guards burst into the town, fifty Red Guards came north from Tyumen. Nicholas was horrified, describing them as ‘robber-Bolsheviks’. The Tyumen armed unit travelled in fifteen troikas bedecked with bells. Wherever they went, they caused a tremendous fuss and noise. The Tyumenites clearly had yet to learn habits of military discipline. If the Omsk Red Guards were disruptive, these newcomers created sheer pandemonium.16 Kobylinski asked the empress to stop sitting out on the balcony for three days. There was a provisional discussion about moving the family to the safety of a church building on the town’s main hill.17 The news was increasingly alarming. Although Nicholas could not observe much from inside Freedom House, he could all too easily hear riflemen singing to their balalaikas till five o’clock in the morning.18 The Tyumen Red Guards had pushed their way into the grounds and demanded the right to free victualling. The Omsk troops were no less alarmed than the men under Kobylinski’s control; they united to throw out the intruders and the trouble subsided.19 A week after arriving in Tobolsk, to everyone’s satisfaction, the Tyumen Red Guards went back home.20
The Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee had for weeks believed that it too should play a part. Kosarev had done too little since receiving responsibility from Sovnarkom, and the dangers in Tobolsk were ever-increasing. Alexander Beloborodov, in later years, said that there was a fear in Ekaterinburg that the Germans might exert pressure on Lenin to secure the imperial family’s release. The Urals leaders set their face against any such outcome and were determined, if the need arose, to ‘liquidate’ Nicholas.21 Already in February 1918, they were planning to govern Tobolsk through a troika under their deputy chairman, Boris Didkovski. The Ekaterinburg communists were sending one of their most accomplished figures. Didkovski was a former emigrant and a trained geologist who combined revolutionary fervour with a knowledge of the world outside Russia. After the October 1917 Revolution he held posts in the gold and platinum industry and was responsible for many of the economic nationalizations in Ekaterinburg – he used the city’s telephone directory as an aid when deciding which enterprises to take into the state’s hands.22 The brief that he received in Ekaterinburg was to bring Tobolsk under control in collaboration with the West Siberian Regional Soviet Executive Committee in Omsk.23
And so, just days after the Omsk Red Guards appeared in Tobolsk, a 400-strong Red Guard detachment moved on the town from Ekaterinburg.24 Beloborodov and Didkovski had put them under the command of Pavel Khokhryakov, who made the trip disguised as a merchant because the enemies of Bolshevism were many in western Siberia. Khokhryakov feigned that he was the fiancé of an Ekaterinburg Bolshevik woman whose mother lived in the neighbouring district of Yalutorovsk.25 In reality Khokhryakov came from Vyatka peasant stock. As a young man he had served as a stoker on battleships in the imperial navy. Calm, steady and not given to boastfulness, he became one of the leading Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg. He was one of those revolutionaries who got on with the practical tasks assigned to him. Although he was no orator, he inspired loyalty. Khokhryakov spoke softly but was harder than he seemed. The story was told that he later personally shot counter-revolutionaries brought to Ekaterinburg from Tobolsk and Omsk. Among them, it was said, was a priest who was the brother of Bishop Germogen. When the priest pleaded for his life and asked for the sentence to be commuted to hard labour, Khokhryakov’s soothing words were: ‘Don’t be worried, old man. We aren’t going to torture you. We’ll shoot you and that will be it. Without any unnecessary suffering.’26
Khokhryakov had three deputies who arrived separately: Semën Zaslavski, Alexander Avdeev and Ivan Loginov. Avdeev – slim, short, ill-kempt and long-haired – was a lathe-turner in his late twenties who had worked at the same factory in Zlokazovo as Loginov. He claimed to have been imprisoned four times in Kresty prison.27 Zaslavski was a Petrograd metalworker sent by the Central Committee to strengthen political work in the Urals, where he soon headed the Nadezhdin Soviet.28 A small troop of Red Guards was sent to them in early April. They too refrained from making the journey en masse: Tobolsk and its environs were enemy territory, and it would seem that Khokhryakov and his comrades were far from being comforted by what they found in the town. Indeed, Khokhryakov sent reports back to Ekaterinburg expressing his alarm about their first experiences.29 The three leaders aimed to get rid of Omsk’s influence and impose a chain of command stretching back to Ekaterinburg. Khokhryakov focused on winning authority in the Tobolsk Soviet. Avdeev’s task was to gain trust among officials at Freedom House. Zaslavski was to concentrate his efforts on planning how to transfer Nicholas to Ekaterinburg and put him under the Urals leadership’s control.30 It was not going to be easy to realize these ambitions, and Zaslavski reported a cold reception both from Kobylinski and from the Tobolsk Soviet.31
But the Ekaterinburg team were bent on making a success of their mission and checks were carried out on everyone travelling out of Tobolsk.32 They wanted to eliminate any possibility that Nicholas might escape northwards down the River Ob. An armed five-man unit was therefore sent to the district centre at Berëzov to set up traffic blocks. Other units were ordered to Golyshmanovo and to the routes that led to Omsk. The instruction was direct and unambiguous: anyone caught answering the description of the former emperor was to be shot. As often with decisions taken in Ekaterinburg, the implementation was somewhat dishevelled. The Berëzov unit was put under arrest by local authorities after making the long trip northwards. Meanwhile the Golyshmanovo unit was found to include men who, after they left Ekaterinburg, boasted that their task was simply to ‘kill the Tsar’; they too were arrested. Wealthy merchants in both places took action against the suspicious interlopers.33 The truth came home to Beloborodov and his comrades that if Tobolsk had nests of anti-Bolshevik activists, the surrounding area was even more dangerous. The idea of leaving the imperial family in that province made less and less sense.
Another account, it ought to be added, puts it a lot more violently. Two armed groups supposedly left Ekaterinburg to patrol the routes out of Tobolsk. The first one was indeed taken into custody in Berëzov. A second was sent by the Urals Regional Executive Committee to the south of Tobolsk, and it soon arrived in the tiny village of Goloputovskoe. Local residents killed them after discovering in whose name they acted.34
Tobolsk itself was seething with armed detachments from other towns even after the departure of the Red Guards of Tyumen, and Kobylinski was to admit that he could not keep pace with all the comings and goings.35 Tensions between one armed detachment and another started to build again. Kobylinski’s men felt under equal threat from both the Omsk and Ekaterinburg contingents, and the Omsk troops resented the Ekaterinburg Red Guards as troublemaking interlopers who had no right to lord it in western Siberia. Kobylinski felt himself to be piggy in the middle. Three Tobolsk Soviet deputies visited Freedom House to find out what was happening. This merely served to heighten the tension. There were also ructions over the Omsk detachment’s pretensions to take charge of guarding the Romanovs.36 At the same time, Dutsman and the other Omsk Red Guard leaders believed that they had every sanction from Sovnarkom to exert control. Fractious encounters occurred across the town as Bolshevik military units confronted each other. When Khokhryakov confronted the leaders from Omsk, they physically seized him and accused him of anti-revolutionary ‘provocation’. Only after liaising on the direct line with the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee did his captors agree to release rather than execute him.37
There was talk among the Red Guard leadership about transferring the Romanovs to Tobolsk prison, and this became the Urals Soviet’s policy. Kobylinski went post-haste to remonstrate with the Red Guards. When they rejected his claim that the Moscow authorities alone could take such a decision, he pointed out that they were anyway being impractical. If the imperial family were to be moved to the prison, the entire guard would have to be billeted there.38
Throughout this time, the Romanovs were trying to keep up with the news but found that the best antidote to the worsening situation was to get on with their lives in the way they had established. The breakfast and lunch menu cards at Freedom House included turkey galantine, wild duck, veal escalopes and roast beef alongside the pasta that the former empress liked.39 Alexandra had never been keen on meat and frequently asked the servant Ivan Sednëv to prepare her favourite dish of macaroni cheese, which he did over a traveller’s spirit stove.40 The rest of the family preferred their usual cuisine. Things settled down a little after the disruptions of recent days, and there was hope that the process would continue uninterrupted by a fresh Red Guard disturbance. The family took exercise, read books and played entertaining games, and when he was not labouring on his outdoor chores, Nicholas sat quietly with his favourite volumes in his favourite spot on the roof of the orangery.41 Nicholas wrote in his diary on 1 April: ‘Learned from our ceaseless informant Alexander Kirpichnikov a lot of things of interest about the Bolsheviks who have arrived from Omsk.’42
But there was nothing that the family could do as the result of what Kirpichnikov told them. The news was always bad for them, and only ever seemed to get worse.