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 [
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.
