The situation began to change in March, in connection with the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The treaty brought terrible odium to the Bolshevik regime. In this atmosphere attempts at restoration could not have been precluded, the more so that the Bolsheviks were aware of pro-monarchist sentiments among German generals. To avoid trouble, precautions were taken to remove the Romanovs from the scene. On March 9, Lenin signed a decree ordering into exile Grand Duke Michael, the putative heir to the Russian throne. Michael had shown no interest in politics since rejecting the crown offered him by Nicholas in March 1917. He lived quietly on his estate at Gatchina, near Petrograd, shunning politics and keeping out of the public eye.2 How unconcerned he was with political events may be gathered from the fact that a few days after turning down the throne, he appeared before the astonished officials of the Petrograd Soviet with a request for permission to hunt on his estate.3 In the summer of 1917 he asked the British Ambassador for a visa to England, but was turned down with the explanation that “His Majesty’s Government do not wish members of the Imperial Family to come to England during the war.”* 4 At the end of 1917, Michael’s petition to Lenin for permission to change his royal name to that of his wife’s, Countess Brasova, received no response.5
Michael was now placed under arrest, first at Smolnyi and then at the Cheka headquarters. On March 12, following the departure of Lenin and the rest of the government for Moscow, he was sent under guard to Perm, not far from Tobolsk. Because the Bolsheviks feared that the Germans might occupy Petrograd and get hold of members of the Imperial family, they decided to remove them from this exposed area. On March 16, Uritskii, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, ordered all members of the family in Petrograd and vicinity to register.6 Later that month, he issued a further order that all these individuals were to be deported to the provinces of Perm, Vologda, or Viatka, at their choice. Once there, they were to report to the local soviet and receive from it residential permits.7 As it turned out, all the Romanovs, except those who were in prison or lived outside Bolshevik control, ended up in Perm. This region had the largest concentration of Bolshevik Party members after Petrograd and Moscow who could be relied upon to keep a sharp eye on the Imperial clan.
These were precautionary measures, for the Bolshevik leadership had not as yet decided what to do with the ex-Tsar and his relatives. In 1911 Lenin had written that “it was necessary to behead at least one hundred Romanovs.”8 Such mass execution, however, would be dangerous, because of the strong monarchist sentiments of the village. One possibility was to try Nicholas before a Revolutionary Tribunal. Isaac Steinberg, who as Commissar of Justice at the time was in a position to know, writes that such a trial was under consideration in February 1918 to prevent a restoration of the monarchy—tacit admission that one year after his universally welcomed abdication, the unpopular Nicholas appealed to enough Russians to worry the Bolsheviks. According to Steinberg, at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee, Spiridonova opposed a trial on the grounds that Nicholas would be lynched en route from Tobolsk. Lenin decided that it was still too early for legal proceedings against the ex-Tsar but ordered that materials for them be gathered.†
In the middle of April, the Russian press carried reports of an impending trial of “Nicholas Romanov.” This, it was said, would be the first of a series of trials of prominent figures of the old regime which Krylenko was readying as head of the Supreme Investigatory Commission. The ex-Tsar would be charged with only those “crimes” which he had committed as constitutional ruler—that is, after October 17, 1905. Among them would be the so-called coup d’état of June 3, 1907, which had violated the Fundamental Laws by arbitrarily changing the electoral law; the improper expenditure of national resources through the “reserved” part of the budget; and other abuses of authority.9 But on April 22 the press reported a denial by Krylenko that Nicholas would be tried. According to Krylenko, the rumors were due to a misunderstanding: the government really meant to try an agent provocateur by the name of Romanov.10
The fact that Tobolsk had no railroad saved it from being immediately caught up in the revolutionary turmoil, for at this time the “Revolution” was spread mainly by gangs of armed men traveling by train. This explains why as late as February 1918 Tobolsk had no Communist Party cell and its soviet remained under the control of SRs and Mensheviks.
