As Yakovlev improvised his itinerary from Tobolsk to Tyumen, Omsk and Ekaterinburg, the Moscow authorities gave the Urals leaders several days to decide how they were going to guard the Romanovs once they at last arrived in the Urals. They needed a site that they could easily keep isolated and impregnable to attack. The most obvious option was the city prison. Beloborodov and Goloshchëkin paid a visit to see whether they might be able to settle Nicholas in a separate wing from the other prisoners. They quickly decided that the architecture of the buildings made this impractical. What also put Beloborodov off was the fact that the director Shechnov, who was in charge of the jail, had been the deputy chief at Perm prison when he himself was a convict there in 1911–1912 – indeed, Shechnov in person had frequently ordered Beloborodov placed in solitary confinement as punishment for his behaviour. Beloborodov accordingly set out with Khotimski, the leading Left Socialist-Revolutionary on the Regional Executive Committee, to reconnoitre other possibilities as they scoured the entire central district for a suitable place of confinement for the Romanovs.1
After examining various public buildings, they narrowed their search to wealthy citizens’ homes and inspected the house belonging to Dr K. S. Arkhipov, an Ekaterinburg liberal who had cooperated with the Bolsheviks. Whether Beloborodov thought it inappropriate to seize the Arkhipov mansion is unknown, but they eventually chose a residence occupied by the Ipatev family at the corner of Voznesenski Prospekt and Voznesenski Lane.
Nikolai Ipatev was a mining engineer and merchant who had benefited from the city’s economic prosperity in the years before and during the Great War. He was a wealthy middle-class notable and his property was judged a suitable target for expropriation, if only on a temporary basis. Ipatev’s house was a large stone building of two storeys, one of them being partially below ground level. It was a comfortable mansion for him and his family. The iron roof was painted green and the external walls had been whitewashed. A small garden ran along the side of the lane.2 On one side it looked down to a broad lake; it also stood on a hill.3 Both these features made it convenient from the viewpoint of security. It was also close to the centre of the city: the leadership liked the idea of a place that was within range of rapid contact. The sole disadvantage was the fact that the UK consulate was directly opposite on Voznesenski Prospekt.4 But the Urals leaders aimed to shield the house from British eyes and it would be turned into a prison in all but name.
Their first requirement was to secure vacant possession. On 27 April 1918, already a full day after the former emperor had departed Tobolsk, Nikolai Ipatev received a visit from the Urals housing commissar, A. N. Zhilinski, who ordered the family to quit the premises within forty-eight hours. Written confirmation would be delivered next day. Ipatev was not allowed to know the identity of the new occupants except that they were people ‘who won’t damage things’. The Ipatevs were thrown into a frenzy as they packed what they could before leaving. In fact, they only had time to gather up small personal possessions. The Urals leaders insisted that the main items of furniture should be left in place. Ipatev took the precaution of locking up the crockery and some carpets, but he was subsequently asked – or rather ordered – to surrender the keys: the authorities intended to put everything at the disposal of the new occupants as soon as they reached Ekaterinburg. Ipatev was displeased and only a little reassured by the arrival of Pavel Bykov, a leading Ekaterinburg Bolshevik and Regional Executive Committee member, to compile an inventory of the house’s contents.5
As a man of property, Ipatev was anyway about to lose all his civic and personal rights under the proposed new Soviet Constitution. He was a ‘bourgeois’, a member of the social class detested and persecuted by Soviet authorities. He was a marked man who had to be wary of annoying the Cheka. So he abandoned the house and most of his possessions and lodged with his Golkondski relatives outside Ekaterinburg in the village of Kurinskoe.6 He could only hope that the Bolsheviks were sincere about looking after the house until he resumed possession. Bykov completed his inventory and put into storage those items that he thought of no use to the Romanovs and their guard detachment.7 The bigger task was to turn the residence into an urban fortress. Goloshchëkin gave Housing Commissar Zhilinski another forty-eight hours to complete the assignment. Zhilinski recruited a hundred workers to refurbish the interior and organize external security. A double fence was put up to prevent people from entering the house unannounced – the outer one made everything but the upstairs windows invisible to the outside world. Zhilinski drove things at a frenetic pace and the work was finished in time for Nicholas’s arrival.8
The Urals communist leaders failed to keep the plan a secret and many people in Ekaterinburg heard that the three Romanovs were on the move, and when news came through that their train had left Tyumen bound for the city, a noisy crowd gathered in and around the railway buildings. Crowds frequently gathered at railway stations in early twentieth-century Russia, when the arrival of trains remained the object of public excitement. Talk of the former emperor’s expected appearance naturally added greatly to the excitement.9
Such was the commotion when the locomotive pulled into station no. 1, however, that Nicholas guessed that yet another dispute had broken out between Yakovlev and the Urals Bolshevik leaders. The truth was that Beloborodov and Goloshchëkin had lost control of the situation in and around the building as more and more people gathered to catch a glimpse of the Romanovs.10 Some came out of curiosity, others to vent their spleen against Nicholas and his relatives. Tempers flared and threats were shouted: ‘They should be done in! They’re in our hands at last!’ The guards supplied by the Urals Bolsheviks began to shift around nervously on the platform and violence became the likely outcome. Yakovlev at that point stepped down from his carriage and ordered his own soldiers to form a cordon around the train with machine guns at the ready. He was astonished to discover the station commissar himself goading the crowd and shouting: ‘Yakovlev! Bring the Romanovs out of the carriage. Let me spit in his filthy face!’ An armed stand-off occurred as it became clear that some of the soldiers on the platform supported the station commissar and were brandishing their loaded weapons.11
The solution, as Yakovlev saw it, was to move the train and its passengers to station no. 2 on the other side of the city and a couple of miles from the outskirts. Station no. 2 was the one used for commercial traffic and would mean another journey of fifteen minutes, and the hope was that the engine would reach there before any of the crowd did. But Yakovlev had reckoned without the continuing difficulty on the platform at station no. 1. Three further hours of negotiation passed while assurances were given that the Romanovs would be held in strict conditions of custody and that there was no ploy to liberate them. Yakovlev for his part held out for a guarantee that no harm would come to his charges. As he never failed to emphasize, Sverdlov’s instructions were to ensure Nicholas’s physical security. Having endured threat after threat since Tobolsk, Yakovlev sought a cast-iron guarantee from the Urals leadership. And all this time the crowd refused to disperse. But time took its toll on everyone and an agreement was achieved for the driver to start up the engine.12
Not surprisingly, the fracas renewed Yakovlev’s concerns about safety. When the train pulled into station no. 2, he delayed the handing over of the captives to Beloborodov and Didkovski. This time there was no calm negotiation, and the Urals leaders, still angry about his management of the journey, bluntly ordered him to fetch the Romanovs from their carriage.13
This time there could be no appeal to Moscow. Beloborodov was now the master.14 Yakovlev’s last act of self-assertion was to line up his detachment around the train until he was sure that an orderly transfer was intended. This took a few minutes while he scouted the surroundings. But the delay could not last. With evident reluctance, he led Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria from their carriage, calling out their names when entrusting them to Beloborodov and Didkovski in person.15 The two Urals leaders presented him with a formal receipt:
30 April 1918: I, the undersigned Chairman of the Urals Regional Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies Alexander Georgievich Beloborodov received from Central Executive Committee Commissar Vasili Vasilevich Yakovlev the delivery of the following from the town of Tobolsk: 1) former tsar Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov, 2) former tsaritsa Alexandra Fëdorovna Romanova and 3) former Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna Romanova to keep them under guard in the city of Ekaterinburg.
A. Beloborodov
B. Didkovski (member of the Urals Regional Soviet)16
Administrative tidiness was a hallmark of Bolshevism across the zone of Soviet power. Ekaterinburg was no exception, and the men of the Urals with this bureaucratic chit were teaching Yakovlev that his authority as Sovnarkom’s plenipotentiary had reached its term.
Troops walked the Romanovs over to two limousines which were to take them to the Ipatev residence. Three Bolshevik leaders stayed for physical oversight of the process: Didkovski sat at the front of one vehicle with Nicholas and Alexandra in the back seats and Beloborodov and Avdeev occupied the second. The plan was to drive at full pelt for the Ipatev house on Voznesenski Prospekt. There was to be no motorcade. After the palaver at station no. 1, Beloborodov had decided that the fewer people who were directly involved, the easier it would be to slip the Romanovs into the building at the destination. This had not been in the original plan for the day, when Goloshchëkin had made arrangements for a lorry full of Red Guards to shepherd ‘the baggage’ on its route. Instead it was Didkovski, Beloborodov and Avdeev who constituted the entire escort. They had one revolver each – Didkovski had a Nagant, Beloborodov a Browning and Avdeev a Mauser. If an organized rescue attempt had been made, it would have had a decent chance of success.17
Despite these precautions, word had got around and there was already a crowd outside the Ipatev house. Goloshchëkin barked an order and the inquisitive bystanders were dispersed.18 The Romanovs entered gladly. Their long, exhausting journey was at an end. Although they did not know it, they were entering a house which they would never leave alive.
This was not the end of trouble for Yakovlev and the detachment which he had led from Tobolsk. Once they had handed over the three Romanovs, they themselves were treated as suspects. Yakovlev and his men from Tobolsk were paying for the breakdown of trust between Yakovlev and Beloborodov. It became obvious that the Urals leaders had only accepted Yakovlev’s continued oversight of Nicholas from Lyubino because it was the sole practical way of securing their arrival in Ekaterinburg – and they also did not want to fall out with Sverdlov. But now the detachment was to pay a heavy price for their involvement. Instead of being congratulated on carrying out an exhausting mission in difficult circumstances, they were taken into custody in Ekaterinburg. The detachment’s soldiers were to claim that they were held in a cellar for three whole days.19 Nabokov and Lebedev were treated worse than Matveev, who was kept apart from them and somehow managed to communicate with Beloborodov and Goloshchëkin.20 Matveev as a fellow Bolshevik was angry at the suggestion that he had been abetting a plan for Nicholas to escape.21
Yakovlev himself, accompanied by his men, was brought in front of the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee, which met in emergency session to sit in judgement about his recent behaviour. It was a noisy affair, as Zaslavski and Avdeev accused him of acting like Nicholas’s loyal subject rather than a revolutionary. Angry words were exchanged. Yakovlev refused to be browbeaten. As proof of his right to act as he had done, he produced the tape of his conversations with Sverdlov. Inevitably this showed the extent of his distrust of the Ekaterinburg leadership, but it also revealed how he had asked Sverdlov’s consent to take the Romanovs off to the mountains in his native Ufa province. Above all, it showed that Yakovlev had consulted Sverdlov throughout recent days in Tyumen and Omsk. Yakovlev denounced Zaslavski and Avdeev for wanting to kill Nicholas whereas Sverdlov had ordered him to protect all the Romanovs – this alone, he said, was why he had asked Sverdlov’s permission to head for Ufa. Although Sverdlov had turned down the idea, he had at least for a while sanctioned the alternative destination of Omsk.22
Yakovlev cleared his name, and the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee Presidium recognized that he was indeed no traitor. Nonetheless, no love was lost between Beloborodov and Yakovlev. The verdict was less than generous. The session recorded that Yakovlev had displayed excessive nervousness and suspiciousness. No allowance was made for the grounds that the Urals leaders had given for Yakovlev to doubt that they were unanimously committed to obeying Moscow’s orders.23
Yet there was no further threat to Yakovlev’s safety or reputation, and Beloborodov wired to Lenin and Sverdlov that Nicholas, Alexandra and their daughter Maria were held securely in Ekaterinburg. The tensions in internal party relations subsided. Beloborodov told Moscow that he awaited further instructions.24 The Urals leaders made clear their unwillingness to work again with Yakovlev. Goloshchëkin, with whom he had once shared an understanding, told him: ‘Oh, Yakovlev, you’ve lost your revolutionary spirit!’25 The Executive Committee packed him off back to Moscow. His soldiers were disarmed, paid off and demobbed; they were free to return to their homes or to Tobolsk. From then onwards, Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks would be responsible for guarding the Romanovs.26 Yakovlev’s first thought was to take all his detachment with him to the capital and have them corroborate what he had experienced since Tobolsk. He had no doubt that Lenin and Sverdlov would be horrified. First, though, Yakovlev returned to Ufa and on 3 May 1918 gave a report to a gathering of two groups of Red Army soldiers. He was still smarting about how the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks had treated him. He had done his duty as agreed with Sverdlov and met with constant deceit and danger.27 Only then did he go to Moscow. His soldiers were no longer with him and he went alone.28