Tobolsk’s isolation ended in March when the Bolsheviks of nearby Ekaterinburg and Omsk evinced an interest in its royal residents. In February, Ekaterinburg held a Congress of Soviets of the Ural Region at which it elected a five-man Presidium controlled by the Bolsheviks. Its chairman, the twenty-six-year-old Alexander Beloborodov, a locksmith or electrician by profession, had been Bolshevik deputy to the Constituent Assembly.* But the most influential member of the Presidium, by virtue of his intimate friendship with Sverdlov, was Isai Goloshchekin, the Military Commissar of the Ural Region. Born in Vitebsk in 1876 in a Jewish family, Goloshchekin had joined Lenin in 1903 and became a member of the Central Committee in 1912. Goloshchekin also served as member of the Ekaterinburg Cheka. He and Beloborodov were to play critical roles in the destiny of the Imperial family.
Our knowledge of the political situation in Ekaterinburg in the spring and summer of 1918 derives almost entirely from a single Communist source, the accounts of P. M. Bykov, which also provide the earliest Soviet version of the Ekaterinburg tragedy.† The Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks were annoyed by the comforts the ex-Tsar was enjoying in Tobolsk and alarmed by the degree of freedom allowed him and his entourage. They feared that with the coming of the spring thaws the Imperial family would flee.11 At the time persistent rumors circulated in the Urals that all sorts of suspicious individuals were assembling in and around Tobolsk.* Some of the Ekaterinburg Communists were extremists who hated Nicholas II—“Nicholas the Bloody”—with genuine passion because of the persecutions they had suffered at the hands of his police. But all of them were afraid of a restoration of the monarchy: not so much out of any abstract political considerations as from fear for their lives. They reasoned as did Robespierre when he pleaded in 1793 before the Convention for a sentence of death to be passed on Louis XVI: “If the king is not guilty, then those who have dethroned him are.”12 They wished the Romanovs out of the way as quickly and expeditiously as possible: and to make certain the ex-Tsar would not get away, they wanted him under their own control, in Ekaterinburg. To this end, in March-April 1918 they contacted Sverdlov.
Omsk had similar ideas, but it lacked connections in Moscow and in the end lost out.
The Ural Regional Soviet in Ekaterinburg discussed the Imperial family as early as February 1918, at which time some deputies expressed fears that by May, when the ice melted on the rivers, the Romanovs would either escape or be abducted. In early March the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks requested from Sverdlov permission to remove the Imperial family.13 A similar request came from Omsk.
To leave nothing to chance, Ekaterinburg dispatched on March 16 to Tobolsk a secret mission to investigate conditions there. After the mission had returned and delivered its report, Ekaterinburg sent an armed detachment to Tobolsk to lay the groundwork for the transfer of the Romanov family. It also posted patrols along possible routes of escape. Upon reaching Tobolsk on March 28, this detachment discovered that it had been preceded by a group of armed Communists sent by Omsk for the same purpose. The Omsk group, which had arrived two days earlier, had dispersed the city Duma and evicted the SRs and Mensheviks from the local soviet. The two groups disputed who was in charge. Being the weaker, the Ekaterinburg detachment had to retreat, but it returned on April 13 with reinforcements led by the Bolshevik S. S. Zaslavskii and took charge. Zaslavskii demanded that the Imperial family be incarcerated.14 To this end, cells were readied in the local prison.15
These events disrupted the calm which the Imperial family had been enjoying until then. Alexandra noted in her diary on March 28/April 10 that she “sewed up” jewels with the help of the children.† Although no evidence has come to light that the Imperial family made plans to escape, and all alleged plots toward this end by sympathizers turned out to be empty talk, an oppressive sense that they were captives rather than exiles overcame the Imperial household. Any possibility, however remote and unreal, of escaping from the Bolsheviks now vanished.16
