The road to Tiumen was in an atrocious condition, badly rutted after the winter and in parts dissolved in mud. Four hours from Tobolsk, they forded the Irtysh River, with the horses wading deep into the icy waters. Halfway, at Ievlevo, they ran into the Tobol River: here the water had flooded the ice and they crossed it walking on wooden planks. Just before Tiumen, they traversed the Tura River, partly on foot, partly by ferry. Iakovlev had organized along the way relays of horses, which reduced stops to a minimum. At one point, Dr. Botkin became ill and the party halted for two hours to allow him to recover. In the evening of the first day, after sixteen hours of travel, they arrived at Bochalino, where arrangements had been made to spend the night. Alexandra jotted down in her diary before retiring:
Marie in a tarantass. Nicholas with Commissar Yakovlev. Cold, gray and windy, crossed the Irtish after changing horses at 8, and at 12 stopped in a village and took tea with our cold provisions. Road perfectly atrocious, frozen ground, mud, snow, water up to the horses’ stomachs, fearfully shaken, pains all over. After the 4th change the poles, on which the body of the tarantass rests, slipped, and we had to climb over into another carriage-box. Changed 5 times horses … At 8 got to Yevlevo where we spent the night in house where was the village shop before. We slept 3 in one room, we on our beds, Marie on the floor on her mattress … One does not tell us where we are going from Tiumen, some imagine Moscow, the little ones are to follow us soon as river free and Baby well.30
En route Iakovlev permitted Alexandra to post letters and telegrams to the children. At one of the stops a peasant approached to ask where Nicholas was being taken. When told he was going to Moscow, the peasant responded: “Glory be to the Lord … to Moscow. That means we will now have order here in Russia again.”31
The guards accompanying the party grew ever more suspicious of Iakovlev because of the deferential manner with which he continued to treat the ex-Tsar. They could not understand why Nicholas seemed so cheerful and began to wonder whether Iakovlev did not intend to spirit him away to eastern Siberia or even Japan. Through patrols which had been posted along the way, they communicated their misgivings to Ekaterinburg.
At 4 a.m. on April 27, after a night passed without incident—the expected ambush had not materialized—the journey resumed. At noon, the party stopped at Pokrovskoe. This village, one of thousands scattered across Siberia, had been the home of Rasputin. Alexandra noted: “stood long before our Friend’s house, saw His family and friends looking out of the window.”
According to Iakovlev, Nicholas seemed to flourish from the exercise and fresh air, while Alexandra “was silent, talked to no one, and acted proud and unapproachable,”32 but both greatly impressed him: “I was struck by the humbleness of these people,” he later told a journalist, “They never complained of anything.”33
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.
