As far as one can determine from the confusing evidence, Iakovlev intended to get to Ekaterinburg as quickly as possible and, leaving it fast behind, proceed to Moscow. But he grew anxious about the prospects of getting his charges safely through that city. He would have been even more alarmed had he known that on April 27, while his party was on the second leg of its journey, a commissar from the Ekaterinburg Soviet appeared at the residence of the engineer Nicholas Ipatev, on the corner of Voznesenskii Prospekt and Voz-nesenskii Street, to inform him that his house was requisitioned for the needs of the Soviet and he was to vacate it within forty-eight hours.34 Ekaterinburg had its own plans for the Romanovs.
Iakovlev’s party arrived at Tiumen at 9 p.m. on April 27. There it was at once surrounded by a troop of cavalrymen, who escorted it to the railroad station, where stood a locomotive and four passenger cars. Iakovlev supervised the transfer of the Imperial family, its staff, and their belongings. Then Nemtsov appeared and, as the Romanovs retired to sleep, the two commissars went to the telegraph office. Using the Hughes apparatus, Iakovlev communicated to Sverdlov his misgivings about the intentions of the local Bolsheviks and requested authorization to remove the Imperial family to a safe place in Ufa province. In the course of a five-hour conversation, Sverdlov rejected this proposal. He agreed, however, to Iakovlev’s proceeding to Moscow not directly, through Ekaterinburg, but by the same roundabout route he had taken earlier that month on his way to Tobolsk—that is, through Omsk, Cheliabinsk, and Samara. To conceal his plan, Iakovlev instructed the station master to send the train in the direction of Ekaterinburg, then, at the next station, attach a new engine, reverse directions and have it proceed at full speed through Tiumen toward Omsk.35 At 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 28, the train bearing the Imperial family left for Ekaterinburg and then turned around. By way of explanation, Iakovlev told Avdeev, an associate of Zaslavskii’s, he had information that Ekaterinburg intended to blow up the train.36
When he awoke in the morning, Nicholas noted with surprise that his train was traveling eastward. He wondered in his diary: “Where are they going to take us after Omsk? To Moscow or Vladivostok?”* Iakovlev would not say. Maria struck up a conversation with the guards, but even her beauty and charm failed to draw them out. Very likely they, too, were ignorant.
Ekaterinburg was advised in the early hours of the morning that the train with the Imperial family was on its way. It only learned of Iakovlev’s ruse later in the day from a telegram sent by Avdeev. The Presidium declared Iakovlev “a traitor to the Revolution” and placed him “outside the law.” Wires to this effect were dispatched in all directions.37
On receipt of this information, Omsk sent a military detachment to intercept Iakovlev’s train before it reached the Kulomzino junction, where it could turn west and, bypassing Omsk, head for Cheliabinsk. When Iakovlev learned that he was accused of attempting to abduct his charges, he stopped the train at the Liubinskaia station. Leaving three passenger cars under guard, he detached the locomotive and proceeded in the fourth to Omsk, to communicate with Moscow. This happened during the night of April 28–29.
The substance of Iakovlev’s conversation with Sverdlov is known only from a most suspect secondhand account by Bykov:
[Iakovlev] called Sverdlov to the telegraph and explained the circumstances which had caused him to change the itinerary. From Moscow came the proposition [predlozhenie] that he take the Romanovs to Ekaterinburg and there turn them over to the Ural Regional Soviet.* 38
This version is almost certainly false, for three reasons. For one, Iakovlev did not “change the itinerary” but proceeded exactly as Sverdlov had instructed him during their previous conversation. Second, the powerful chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Lenin’s close confidant would not “propose” to a minor functionary, but would order him. Third, if Sverdlov indeed wanted Iakovlev to turn over the Imperial family to the Ekaterinburg Soviet, there would not have occurred the next day a three-hour altercation in Ekaterinburg between Iakovlev and the local Bolshevik Party. The most plausible explanation—though it is only conjecture—is that Sverdlov told Iakovlev to avoid getting into an argument with the Ekaterinburg Soviet, which mistrusted him, and to proceed to Moscow by way of Ekaterinburg so as to put to rest suspicions that he intended to abduct the ex-Tsar.
After talking to Sverdlov, Iakovlev ordered the engineer to reverse direction. All this transpired during the night, while Nicholas and family were asleep. On awakening in the morning of April 29, Nicholas noted that the train was now traveling westward, which confirmed his earlier belief that he was being taken to Moscow. Alexandra noted in her diary, most likely from information supplied by Iakovlev: “Omsk soviet would not let us pass Omsk and feared one wished to take us to Japan.” Nicholas wrote on that day: “We are all in good spirits.” Thus, the prospect of being delivered out of the hands of their tormentors to foreigners did not please them, but it raised their spirits to be taken to Russia’s ancient capital, now the main citadel of Bolshevism.
They traveled all that day and the night that followed, with occasional stops, to cover the 850 kilometers between Omsk and Ekaterinburg. The voyage was uneventful. Iakovlev recalled that the ex-Tsarina was so painfully shy that she would wait for hours to go to the lavatory, until the car was clear of strangers, and remain there until she was sure there was no one in the corridor.39
The train pulled into the main Ekaterinburg station on April 30 at 8:40 a.m. Here a large hostile crowd had gathered, apparently assembled by the local Bolsheviks to pressure Iakovlev into turning over his charges. The events of the next three hours, during which the train stood in place, its passengers forbidden to leave, are shrouded in confusion. It seems that Iakovlev refused to surrender Nicholas and Alexandra because they would not be safe in Ekaterinburg. According to Nicholas’s diary: “We waited three hours at the station. A strong conflict [literally: fermentation] occurred between the local commissars and ours. In the end, the former won out.” Nicholas, in his simplicity, believed that the argument was over which station to detrain, because shortly after noon they were shunted to a secondary, commercial depot, Ekaterinburg II. Alexandra knew better: “Yakovlev had to give us over to the Ural regional soviet,” she wrote in her diary. The dispute between Iakovlev and the local commissars was indeed over the question whether the party would proceed to Moscow. Iakovlev lost the argument, possibly after the intervention of Moscow, which did not wish to antagonize the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks and was not quite certain what to do with the Romanovs in any event. Leaving them in Ekaterinburg in safe hands, until some future trial of the ex-Tsar, may well have appeared to Lenin and Sverdlov as not a bad compromise.
Once the train pulled into Ekaterinburg II, Iakovlev turned over the prisoners to Beloborodov, obtaining from him a handwritten receipt which absolved him of further responsibility in the matter.40 He demanded guards, presumably to protect the Imperial family from mob violence.41 Before being allowed to depart for Moscow he had to explain his actions to the Ekaterinburg Soviet, which he apparently did to its satisfaction.42 That he had done nothing wrong in the eyes of his superiors in Moscow is indicated by the fact that a month later he was appointed chief of staff of the Red Army forces in Samara and, subsequently, commander of the Second Red Army on the Eastern (Ural) Front.*
At 3 p.m. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Maria, accompanied by Beloborodov and Avdeev, were taken in two open cars to the center of town, followed by a truck which Alexandra described as filled with soldiers “armed to their teeth.” According to Avdeev,43 Beloborodov told Nicholas that the Central Executive Committee in Moscow had ordered him and his family detained until his forthcoming trial. The cars stopped at Ipatev’s large, whitewashed house, which the owner had vacated the day before and which the Bolsheviks now called the “House of Special Designation.” The Imperial family would not leave it alive.