being brought before the soldiers’ tribunal and accused of being counterrevolutionaries.
The hours passed, but the train, ordered for one a.m., did not appear. The railwaymen, suspicious and hostile, had refused to shunt the cars together, then refused to couple them. Kerensky himself went repeatedly to telephone the yards. Kobylinsky, exhausted and still unwell, collapsed into a chair and fell asleep. At one point, Benckendorff got Kerensky’s attention and asked him before witnesses how long the Imperial family would stay in Tobolsk. Kerensky confidently assured the Count that, once the Constituent Assembly had met in November, Nicholas could freely return to Tsarskoe Selo or go anywhere he wished. Undoubtedly, Kerensky was sincere. But in November he himself was a fugitive from the Bolsheviks.
Between five and six a.m., the waiting group at last heard the blare of automobile horns in the courtyard. Kerensky informed Nicholas that the train was ready and the baggage loaded. The family entered the automobiles, and the little procession was surrounded by a mounted escort of Cossacks. As they left the palace grounds, the early-morning sun cast its first rays on the sleeping village. The train, wearing Japanese flags and bearing placards proclaiming “Japanese Red Cross Mission,” was standing on a siding outside the station. The family walked beside the track to the first car, where, for lack of steps, the men lifted Alexandra, her daughters and the other women onto the car platform. As soon as all were aboard, the train began moving eastward, toward Siberia.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
IF the train which Kerensky provided for the Tsar’s journey to Siberia was not of Imperial quality, it was nevertheless a luxurious vehicle for the transfer of prisoners. It consisted of comfortable
The train routine deferred entirely to the established habits of the Imperial family: breakfast at eight, morning coffee at ten, lunch at one, tea at five and dinner at eight. Between six and seven every evening, the train came to a stop in open country so that Nicholas and the children could walk the dogs for half an hour along the track. Alexandra did not attempt these excursions. She sat fanning herself in the heat by an open window and was delighted one afternoon when a soldier reached up and handed her a cornflower.
For four days, the train rolled eastward, clicking monotonously over the rails through the heat and dust of European Russia. The passengers saw no one. At every village, the station was surrounded by troops, the blinds in the coaches were drawn and no one was permitted to show himself at the window. Only once was the train forced to halt by curious local officials. At Perm, on the edge of the Urals, a tall, white-bearded man entered Kobylinsky’s compartment, introduced himself as head of the railroad workmen in that district and said that the comrades wanted to know who was on the train. Kobylinsky produced his paper bearing Kerensky’s signature, and the workers immediately stood aside.
On the evening of the third day, as the train was crossing the Urals, the air grew noticeably cooler. East of this low range of forested hills lay the beginnings of the Siberian steppe. From the windows of the puffing, rattling train, the Empress and her children saw for the first time the meadowland stretching to the horizon. In late afternoon, the immense dome of sky overhead turned bright crimson and gold as the last rays of sunset glowed on the white trunks of the birches and the green stems of marsh grasses.
Near midnight on August 17, the train crawled slowly into Tyumen on the Tura River. At a dock across from the station, the river steamer
Before sunset on the afternoon of the second day, the boat rounded a bend in the river and the passengers saw the silhouette of the old Tobolsk fortress and the onion bulbs of the city’s churches. At dusk, the steamer docked at the wharf of the West Siberian Steamship and Trading Company, and Kobylinsky went ashore to inspect the governor’s house, where the prisoners would live. He found the house dilapidated and bare of furnishings. The following morning, postponing the family’s occupancy, he hired painters and paperers and bought furniture and a piano from stores and private families in Tobolsk. Electricians were summoned to improve the wiring, and plumbers came to install bathtubs. During the eight days it took to refurbish the house, the family lived aboard the
Tobolsk, where the Tsar and his family were to live for the next eight months, lay at the juncture of the Tobol and the mighty Irtysh River. Once it had been an important trading center for fish and furs, a link with the Arctic, which lay farther north. But the builders of the Trans-Siberian Railroad had by-passed Tobolsk, going two hundred miles to the south, through Tyumen. In 1917, Tobolsk was, as Kerensky described it, “a backwater.” Its twenty thousand people still lived mostly from trade with the north. In the summer, all transport moved by river steamer; in the winter, when the rivers were frozen, people traveled in sledges along the river ice or paths cut through the snow along the banks. The town itself was a sprawl of whitewashed churches, wooden commercial buildings and log houses scattered along streets thick with dust in the summer. In spring and fall, the dust turned to thick, syrupy mud, and the wooden planks laid down as sidewalks often sank out of sight.
The governor’s house, a big, white, two-story structure fringed on each side with second-floor balconies, was the largest residence in town. Still, it was not large enough for the Imperial entourage. The family itself filled up the mansion’s second floor, with the four Grand Duchesses sharing a corner room and Nagorny sleeping in a room next to Alexis. Gilliard lived downstairs off the big central drawing room in what had been the governor’s study. The remainder of the household lived across the street in a house commandeered from a merchant named Kornilov.
At first, Kobylinsky posted no guards inside the governor’s house and allowed the family considerable freedom of movement. On their first morning in Tobolsk, they all walked across the street to see how the suite was settling into the Kornilov house. The soldiers immediately objected to this degree of freedom for prisoners, and Kobylinsky reluctantly authorized the building of a high wooden fence around the house, enclosing a section of a small side street which ran beside the house. Inside this muddy, treeless compound, the family took all its exercise. The suite, on the other hand, was permitted to come and go freely, and when Sidney Gibbs, the Tsarevich’s English tutor, arrived from Petrograd, he had no difficulty entering the house and joining the family. Several of the Empress’s maids took apartments in town, and Dr. Botkin was even allowed to establish a small medical practice in Tobolsk.
Evening prayer services were held in a corner of the downstairs drawing room which was decorated with icons and lamps. A local priest came in to conduct these prayers, but because there was no consecrated altar he was unable to offer Mass. On September 21, Kobylinsky arranged for the family to begin attending a private early Mass at a nearby church. On these occasions, two lines of soldiers formed in the public garden which lay between the house and the church. As the Imperial family walked between the two lines, people standing behind the soldiers crossed themselves and some dropped to their knees.
As Kerensky had suspected, the people of Tobolsk remained strongly attached to both the symbol and the person of the Tsar. Walking past the governor’s house, they removed their caps and crossed themselves. When the
