By May 1918, there was growing evidence of malfeasance inside the guard detachment at the Ipatev house. Avdeev conducted an inquiry at the end of the month and, as a result, sacked his deputy Alexander Moshkin for thieving Romanov property. But Avdeev himself was corrupt. When shortly afterwards he too was found guilty of theft, the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee removed him from his duties and he was never seen in the Ipatev house again.1
The Chekist Yakov Yurovski was named to take Avdeev’s place as commandant and bring order to the guard system. The new commandant was a big, beetroot-cheeked man with a personality to match.2 Yurovski had worked as a regimental medical orderly in the army’s wartime hospitals. After the February Revolution he was elected to the Ekaterinburg Soviet. There was talk that he had started out as a Socialist-Revolutionary.3 If true, this was hardly an unusual change of stance. The Bolsheviks in 1917 had acted as a magnet for many people who saw them as the sole party capable of taming capitalism and ending the Great War. Like other young militants, Yurovski was proving himself in the fires of the country’s turmoil and he rose to the Urals regional Cheka board after the Bolshevik seizure of power and the establishment of Sovnarkom.
The Urals leadership demanded order in the guard detachment. They told Yurovski nothing about what ultimate fate was intended for the Romanovs, and they themselves at this moment knew nothing more than the current Moscow gossip – and the Sovnarkom discussions about putting Nicholas on trial can hardly have escaped the knowledge of the Regional Soviet Executive Committee and trusted officials.4
Yurovski’s first inspection of the Ipatev house convinced him that management under Avdeev had been incompetent as well as corrupt. He decided to introduce fresh guards even though the old ones had been employed only since the end of April; he brought members of the Ekaterinburg leadership’s own special-purpose detachment with him to create a reliable core.5 Yurovski had a low opinion of the Russian workers Avdeev had recruited from the Urals factories and instead introduced some trusted Latvians. While continuing to allow the Russians to patrol the exterior of the house, he reserved tasks of internal security for his Latvian team. While aiming to strengthen discipline, he may also have seen advantage in having guards who were less than fully fluent in Russian and would be unable to talk informally with the Romanovs.6 He drastically reorganized the living quarters by allowing the newcomers to monopolize the occupancy of the lower floor of the Ipatev house.7 Whenever he was on duty, Yurovski signalled that the old laxities were no longer tolerable. As a Cheka officer, he turned the residence into a prison-fortress.
Beloborodov visited to inform Nicholas in person about the change of personnel. The thefts of property were going to be stamped out, and Yurovski together with an assistant drew up an inventory of gold rings and bracelets. They took items off with them for safekeeping, but not before explaining that illicit instances of sales of several items had been detected – and Avdeev had been found guilty. (Nicholas privately thought that Avdeev had been unable to control the unit and felt rather sorry for him.)8 Yurovski, however, took a different viewpoint. If Avdeev had succumbed to temptation, so too might any of the Latvians. The practicalities in one instance were trickier than he had imagined, and he gave up the attempt to remove a bracelet from the empress when she exclaimed that she had worn it on her wrist for twenty years and would need a key to take it off.9 He returned next day with a casket containing all the removed valuables and asked the Romanovs to check that nothing was still missing. With that he sealed the casket and handed it to them for safekeeping.10
The list of objections to Avdeev grew longer: he had omitted to formulate a plan for evacuation in case of fire; he had allowed some correspondence between the Romanovs and their friends outside the city, and nuns from a nearby monastery were still bringing food into the residence.11
Yurovski was severe from the start. He turned down Nicholas’s request for permission to clean the garden area.12 He put the family on the same rations as ordinary Ekaterinburg citizens and stopped outsiders from delivering delicacies that supplemented their diet. He wanted to reduce Nicholas to ‘the condition of an average bourgeois’. No case for privileges would be entertained. He rejected a complaint from the cook Kharitonov that he could not prepare a decent dish for the household from a quarter-pound of meat. Yurovski indicated that the Romanovs had to get used to living as prisoners rather than as respected members of the erstwhile imperial dynasty.13 When the nun Maria Krokhaleva turned up as usual at the outside door with a basket of food, he asked: ‘Who gave you permission to bring things?’ Krokhaleva explained that Avdeev had allowed the delivery on advice from Dr Derevenko. This failed to reassure Yurovski, who queried where the milk came from. Krokhaleva explained that the cows belonged to the monastery farm. Her patent honesty calmed him down, and he too started to make suggestions about what else the monastery might supply. (Like his predecessor, he was possibly aiming to improve the entire household’s diet.)14
Although he curtailed the previous illicit practices, however, he did nothing about general standards of behaviour. Chekists like Yurovski aspired to political order and shared the Bolshevik contempt for middle-class prejudices. Whatever background they came from, they cultivated a swaggering vulgarity. One of the guards, Faika Safonov, scrawled ‘fuck’ and other lewd swearwords on the wall and sang dirty songs. Permission for religious services was less readily granted. Moreover, a shot was fired at Anastasia when she tried to look out on to the street from a window. Yurovski and Nikulin indulged themselves. Seated at the piano in the commandant’s room in the evenings, Nikulin struck up some revolutionary songs – and Yurovski was heard joining in. Nikulin also brought his blonde lover into the house.15
Reports of trouble at the Ipatev house began to reach Moscow, and Sverdlov remembered the warnings that Yakovlev had constantly given about the Ural leadership and its wildness. He sent a message of concern to Beloborodov, telling him of the kind of stories he had been hearing. Beloborodov assured him that all was well now that Moshkin was under arrest and Yurovski had replaced Avdeev, and the composition of the entire internal guard unit had been renewed. There was, therefore, no reason for Moscow to worry.16 But rumours were flying around the Urals. One of them had it that the Bolsheviks had slaughtered Nicholas and his family. The French vice-consul, staying at the British consulate in Ekaterinburg, sent out a telegram on 9 July rejecting these stories.17 As soon as one false story was successfully dismissed, another spread around the city. Ekaterinburg was buzzing with presentiments about the coming approach of the Czechoslovak Legion, and the thoughts of many people turned towards the question of what might lie in store for the imperial family.
Father Ioann Storozhev sensed that the Romanovs were depressed when he conducted a service for them on 14 July. Their desire for spiritual refreshment was almost palpable, and although they were forbidden to talk to him after the service, he thought he could hear one of the daughters saying a quiet thank you. He felt drained by the experience. In the commandant’s office afterwards, Yurovski asked: ‘Why are you breathing so heavily?’ The priest replied: ‘I feel sad because I gave so little of a service and I’m weak and sweaty. I’m leaving now and about to get flu.’ Yurovski finally found something in common with the clergy and said: ‘Well, let’s close the window to stop the draught.’ Storozhev replied it was time to go home. Yurovski said he could wait a while if he wanted, adding sympathetically: ‘Well, look, they’ve said their prayers and now the heart rests easier.’ He added: ‘I’ve never denied the influence of religion and I say that to you in all frankness.’ Taken aback by these words, Storozhev thanked him for permitting the service to take place. Yurovski seemed annoyed by the remark and snapped: ‘But where do we forbid any of this?’ Storozhev sensed that it would be imprudent to prolong the conversation. Yurovski offered his hand. They shook and then parted.18
When Storozhev and his deacon, Buimirov, had left the Ipatev house and were by themselves, they reflected on the day’s experience. Buimirov gave voice to an instinctive impression: ‘You know, Father Priest, something has happened there with them.’ Storozhev thought the same but asked him to explain. Buimirov answered that none of the Romanovs had sung during the service. The imperial family were known as lusty singers. Their reticence, he thought, must have some unpleasant meaning.19
The Romanovs had, in fact, picked up hints about what was happening militarily in the area near to Ekaterinburg, despite the fact that their guards told them almost nothing and sometimes fed them with misinformation. But they could see and hear enough to know that big changes were afoot, changes that were unlikely to enhance their physical security. As they listened to the noise on the streets, they detected the familiar sound of artillery being trundled. They knew that Austrian former POWs were being prepared for defence against the expected offensive by the Czechs. The irony was not lost on Alexandra, who recorded in her diary on 13 July that both the Austrian and Czech forces were constituted from troops who had once been in Russian captivity.20 The external disturbances outside Freedom House in Tobolsk were dwarfed by the warfare that was rumbling its way through the Urals and approaching Ekaterinburg. From being on the periphery of the intensifying civil war, the city was set to become one of its main military fronts – and Nicholas and his family could sense that the fighting would almost certainly have adverse consequences for them.