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.
Nicholas Ipatev, a retired army engineer, was a well-to-do businessman. He had acquired the house only a few months earlier, and used it partly as residence, partly as business office. It was a two-story stone building, constructed in the late nineteenth century in the ornate style favored by Muscovite boyars which returned to fashion at that time, with unusual luxuries such as hot running water and electric lights. He had furnished only the upper story, which consisted of three bedrooms, dining room, salon, reception room, kitchen, bathroom, and lavatory. The lower story, a semi-basement, was empty. The building had a small garden and several attached structures, one of which was used to store the belongings of the Imperial family. While the train was shuttling between Ekaterinburg and Omsk, workers had constructed a crude palisade to conceal the house from the street and block the inmates’ view. On June 5, another, taller palisade was added.
95. Ipatev’s house—the “House of Special Designation”: The murder occurred in the basement room with the arched-frame window on the lower left.
