Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee could provide only intermittent assistance to Ekaterinburg. Communications were patchy and fragile – the cable system became so disrupted that messages between the two centres sometimes had to be routed through Petrograd, which slowed down the exchange of news. The Bolsheviks had advanced their power by fostering a spirit of self-reliance amidst their provincial cadres. Lenin often had to sit back while they furthered the party’s cause as they saw fit. Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee sent out emissaries whenever possible, but local party committees were always pleading for more of them. The Bolshevik Party had a chronic shortage of personnel. Having achieved exponential growth since spring 1917, it had had no time to train up the number of officials that were essential for a governing party to govern. At times the best that Lenin could do was to issue decrees and call on lower party organizations to show initiative in working out how to implement them. He explained that the decrees themselves were of a ‘demonstrative’ character rather than detailed legal instructions. He and Sverdlov insisted that this was what things were like in the heat of revolution.1
Lenin and Sverdlov remained in close contact with Ekaterinburg, and there were frequent conversations on the Hughes apparatus while Nicholas was on his way between Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg.2 On 2 May 1918, Sovnarkom discussed the Romanovs for the first time since their arrival in Ekaterinburg three days earlier. Reports from the Urals confirmed that there was no serious danger of successful escape. A public announcement about Nicholas’s transfer was required and Sverdlov was asked to compose a suitable concise draft for the Soviet press.3 Otherwise, little was revealed about what was happening to the Romanovs. An exception was made on 16 May 1918 in Izvestiya with an interview of Yakovlev about the trip from Tobolsk. Yakovlev mentioned the conversations he had had with Nicholas and Alexandra. He spoke of Nicholas without rancour, save that he criticized his ‘phenomenal limitedness’, but he did not hold back about Alexandra, accusing her of low cunning and pride – and he omitted all reference to the disputes among Bolsheviks in Tobolsk, Omsk and Ekaterinburg.4
On 19 May the Bolshevik Central Committee again put ‘Nikolai Romanov’ on its agenda. Sverdlov noted that the Central Executive Committee Presidium, which he chaired, had recently discussed the preferred ‘fate’ of the Romanovs. He reported that Bolshevik leaders in the Urals were pressing for a ruling on the matter. At Sverdlov’s suggestion, it was decided to delay any action while maintaining Nicholas’s physical safety. Sverdlov was to pass on this decision to the men of the Urals and urge them to understand the increasingly difficult conditions in Moscow.5 Nonetheless, the Central Committee kept its focus on making steady preparations for a show trial. In line with this, on 4 June 1918, the People’s Commissariat of Justice put its comrade Bogrov at Sovnarkom’s disposal. Bogrov was to gather the necessary pile of documentation for court proceedings so that the authorities might have a credible charge sheet against Nicholas.6 It was the same state of affairs as in February 1918 when Sovnarkom had first asked the same People’s Commissariat to prepare the case. Now the People’s Commissariat was tossing the task back to Sovnarkom and offering young Bogrov to help out.
Reports appeared in Moscow newspapers not controlled by the Bolsheviks that Red Guards had killed Nicholas in Ekaterinburg.7 The Soviet government was alarmed by the spread of the story, which had the potential to upset relations with both the Germans and the Allies. The Urals leadership, moreover, had a record of pursuing its own line. It was vital to ascertain the truth. On 20 June Lenin’s personal assistant, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, telegrammed to enquire whether there was any truth in the stories that the Urals leadership had executed Nicholas. It took three days for the message to reach Ekaterinburg. Bonch-Bruevich had to repeat his enquiry next day.8
Moscow found it difficult to be sure what was happening in Ekaterinburg, and there was a degree of suspicion that Beloborodov and his comrades were not always providing unbiased information. When yet another story spread in the capital that the Regional Executive Committee had killed the Romanovs, Lenin and Sverdlov demanded an independent testimony one way or another. Reinhold Bērziņš, the commander-in-chief of the North Urals and Siberian Front, was ordered to carry out an inspection of the Ipatev house. The Latvian Bērziņš was trusted in Moscow as a military leader who had no dogs in the fight. He telegrammed his findings to Moscow on 27 June. The story about the emperor’s execution, he assured Lenin and Sverdlov, was a simple ‘provocation’ that lacked all credibility.9 But the episode showed that if Ekaterinburg had no firm confidence in Moscow, the feeling was reciprocated by Moscow. After all, it hardly enhanced Soviet military preparedness when one of the Red Army’s leading commanders was asked to abandon his operational duties and conduct an on-the-spot inquiry about a handful of civilian detainees.
The Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee, as all its members and rare official outsiders like Bērziņš were only too well aware, was under ever-growing challenge in the city itself. Mikhail Efremov, the city Cheka leader, organized a raid on Kadet offices in May 1918 to seize files and arrest leading activists.10 Opposition of a more dangerous kind emerged when the Socialist-Revolutionaries began to train armed units in woods on the outskirts. Ten Red Guards were sent to flush them out. The search proved fruitless, and the possibility of an internal military challenge to Bolshevism grew.11 On 17 May the Red Guards went out to Upper Iset and suppressed a Socialist-Revolutionary uprising, executing thirty captured militants.12 Anarchists too maintained their own urban force and constantly criticized the Bolsheviks. Their leader, Pëtr Zhebenev, raised a black flag over headquarters that had formerly belonged to an engineer named Zheleznov. The Cheka delivered an ultimatum, telling them to get out or face an assault, and when their cache of machine guns was later discovered, the regional soviet administration was convinced that they had been plotting something untoward.13
While control was firm at Voznesenski Prospekt, other parts of the central precincts were less easy to secure. On 12 June 1918 the Bolshevik leaders discovered an apparent attempt at subversion by means of a move to arm the wounded troops who remained in the city. Red intelligence about the movement of Czechoslovak forces in Siberia and the Volga region was terrifying. Omsk had fallen to them only four days earlier. Now it seemed that the anti-Bolsheviks were organizing an internal assault on Soviet power. Preventive measures were taken that included the seizure of businessmen and intellectuals as hostages. If an uprising occurred in Ekaterinburg, these people would immediately be executed.14
Since the end of May, Beloborodov had had to prepare for the worst as reports of the relentless movement of trains carrying the Czechoslovak Legion arrived on his desk. A body of 500 Kronstadt sailors arrived to stiffen revolutionary morale, but they caused trouble, especially after they seized a vodka distillery and its contents.15 Ekaterinburg had to prepare its own defence and boosted the local recruitment to Red forces. This was becoming an arduous task as the word spread that the troops of the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee would soon be fighting an armed contingent which had crushed every body of Soviet soldiers which had been deployed against it. Beloborodov maintained a show of optimism. While anti-Bolsheviks among the city’s inhabitants began to pray for rapid success by the Czechoslovaks, he resolved to teach them a lesson in Bolshevik grit and ruthlessness. First, he arrested a bunch of wealthy residents and put them to manual labour. Trenches had to be dug on the outskirts of the city and the Ekaterinburg Soviet administration reversed the conventional social routines in this kind of emergency. Immediately there were objections from the conscripted individuals, several of whom claimed physical incapacitation. Health Commissar Sakovich vetted three of them on behalf of the Urals Regional Soviet – he later claimed that his habit of releasing people from their obligations incurred a threat to mobilize Sakovich himself for digging work.16
The Urals Bolsheviks prided themselves on refusing to take the path of compromise that Lenin had taken. They continued to uphold the policies that they had advocated in 1917, and while refraining from direct destabilization of Sovnarkom, they did what they could to ensure that Bolshevik measures became more radical. In Moscow, they assumed, there was a chance that Lenin, the architect of the Brest-Litovsk treaty on the Russian side, might accede to further pressure from Berlin. They obeyed Lenin and his Sovnarkom without trusting him.
The Regional Executive Committee suspected that some nefarious concession might be in motion when an order was issued for a number of prominent aristocrats of the Baltic region to be dispatched from Ekaterinburg to Petrograd. These people had recently arrived in the Urals for use as political hostages. Among them was Count Lieven. Beloborodov and his comrades disliked any idea that Sovnarkom might be caving in to German demands for their liberation.17 But the Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee could not just snub its nose at Lenin. As the Czechoslovaks advanced ever nearer, the Bolsheviks of Ekaterinburg needed whatever assistance that Moscow could provide. Beloborodov and Goloshchëkin were in no position to annoy the central party leadership unduly at a time when they hoped for military support and knew that its own forces were inadequate. Ekaterinburg’s finances, moreover, were ruinous, and in early May an urgent plea had gone forth for Moscow to bail them out – and Sovnarkom had sent a trainload of banknotes. The Urals Regional Soviet Executive Committee had to ring the central streets with Red Guard units while the crates were delivered from the station.18
The Soviet Regional Executive Committee recognized that it could not put together an effective defence of the city, and steps were taken to prepare for a timely evacuation of personnel and finance before the Czechoslovaks arrived. The enemy was approaching unopposed, according to dependable reports, from two directions. As the Czechoslovak Legion moved westward along the Trans-Siberian Railway, another force was approaching from Kuzino.19 Panic was beginning to grow among sympathizers with Sovnarkom as the Czechoslovaks got nearer. The long-awaited military dénouement was at hand and every Red Guard volunteer was mobilized. Safarov and other leading comrades hurried round the factories in an effort to ensure that all of them turned up for duty; they also strove to recruit new volunteers.20 Workers were told of the horrors awaiting them if the counter-revolutionary forces proved victorious. But every Urals leader also knew that the Bolsheviks could not resist for long. Priority was given to gathering everything of value and assembling it at the railway station for transport to the west. The next destination could only be Perm.