On March 7th while his family was in
Tsarskoye Selo, Nicholas was stuck in Stavka. He kept in touch with Alexandra through several letters, in which they expressed how much they missed each other. Shortly following his abdication on March 15th, Tsar
Nicholas II, addressed by the sentries as "Nicholas Romanov", was reunited with his family at the
Alexander Palace in
Tsarskoye Selo, on March 22nd. He was placed under
house arrest with his family by the
Provisional Government, and the family was surrounded by guards and confined to their quarters. During this time Alexandra recorded in her diary the temperatures of her children, specifically Alexei, Tatiana, and Olga who were ill. In August 1917, after a failed attempt to send the Romanovs to the United Kingdom, where the ruling monarch,
King George V, was the mutual first cousin of Nicholas and his wife
Alexandra,
Alexander Kerensky's provisional government evacuated the Romanovs to
Tobolsk,
Siberia, allegedly to protect them from the rising tide of revolution. There they lived in the
former governor's mansion in considerable comfort. The justice minister in charge of handling the family's arrest, Kerensky, highlighted in his speeches how he hopes this treatment will cause Nicholas to feel ashamed of the “horrors that had been perpetuated in his name”. However the guards were cruel towards the family and often scribbled insulting graffiti on the walls and benches. As the Bolsheviks gathered strength, the government moved Nicholas, Alexandra, and their daughter
Maria to
Yekaterinburg under the direction of
Vasily Yakovlev in April 1918.
Alexei, who had severe
haemophilia, was too ill to accompany his parents and remained with his sisters
Olga,
Tatiana, and
Anastasia, not leaving Tobolsk until May. The family was imprisoned with their few remaining retainers in Yekaterinburg's
Ipatiev House, which was designated the House of Special Purpose ():
House of Special Purpose working on a
kitchen garden at Alexander Palace in May 1917. The family was allowed no such indulgences at the Ipatiev House. The Romanovs were kept in strict isolation at the Ipatiev House. They were forbidden to speak any language other than
Russian and were not permitted access to their luggage, which was stored in a warehouse in the interior courtyard. The imperial family was subjected to regular searches of their belongings, confiscation of their money for "safekeeping by the Ural Regional Soviet's treasurer", and attempts to remove Alexandra's and her daughters' gold bracelets from their wrists. The house was surrounded by a double
palisade that obscured the view of the streets from the house. The initial fence enclosed the garden along Voznesensky Lane. On 5 June a second palisade was erected, higher and longer than the first, which completely enclosed the property. The second palisade was constructed after it was learned that passersby could see Nicholas's legs when he used the double
swing in the garden. The windows in all the family's rooms were sealed shut and covered with newspapers (later painted with
whitewash on 15 May). Their only source of ventilation was a
fortochka in the grand duchesses' bedroom, but peeking out of it was strictly forbidden; in May a sentry fired a shot at Anastasia when she looked out. After the Romanovs made repeated requests, one of the two windows in the tsar and tsarina's corner bedroom was unsealed on 23 June 1918. The guards were ordered to increase their surveillance accordingly, and the prisoners were warned not to look out of the window or attempt to signal to anyone outside, on pain of being shot. From this window, they could see only the
spire of the Voznesensky Cathedral located across the road from the house. window where a
Maxim gun was positioned. Directly below it was the tsar and tsarina's bedroom. aimed at the tsar and tsaritsa's bedroom on the southeastern corner of the house. The guard commandant and his senior aides had complete access at any time to all rooms occupied by the family. The prisoners were required to ring a bell each time they wished to leave their rooms to use the bathroom and lavatory on the landing. Strict rationing of the water supply was enforced on the prisoners after the guards complained that it regularly ran out. Recreation was allowed only twice daily in the garden, for half an hour morning and afternoon. The prisoners were ordered not to engage in conversation with any of the guards. Rations were mostly tea and black bread for breakfast, and
cutlets or soup with meat for lunch; the prisoners were informed that "they were no longer permitted to live like tsars". In mid-June,
nuns from the Novo-Tikhvinsky Monastery also brought the family food on a daily basis, most of which the captors took when it arrived. while Dr
Vladimir Derevenko's regular visits to treat Alexei were curtailed when Yurovsky became commandant. No excursions to
Divine Liturgy at the nearby church were permitted. and
Ivan Dmitrievich Sednev (
OTMA's footman;
Leonid Sednev's uncle), "had been sent out of this government" (i.e., out of the jurisdiction of Yekaterinburg and Perm province). In fact, both men were already dead: after the Bolsheviks had removed them from the Ipatiev House in May, they had been shot by the
Cheka with a group of other hostages on 6 July, in reprisal for the death of , Chairman of the Ural Regional Committee of the Bolshevik Party killed by the Whites. On 14 July, a priest and deacon conducted a
liturgy for the Romanovs. The following morning, four housemaids were hired to wash the floors of the Popov House and Ipatiev House; they were the last civilians to see the family alive. On both occasions, they were under strict instructions not to engage in conversation with the family. Yurovsky always kept watch during the liturgy and while the housemaids were cleaning the bedrooms with the family. The sixteen men of the internal guard slept in the basement, hallway, and commandant's office during shifts. The external guard, led by Pavel Medvedev, numbered 56 and took over the Popov House opposite. When Yurovsky replaced Aleksandr Avdeev on 4 July, he moved the old internal guard members to the Popov House. The senior aides were retained but were designated to guard the hallway area and no longer had access to the Romanovs' rooms; only Yurovsky's men had it. The local Cheka chose replacements from the volunteer battalions of the Verkh-Isetsk factory at Yurovsky's request. He wanted dedicated Bolsheviks who could be relied on to do whatever was asked of them. They were hired on the understanding that they would be prepared, if necessary, to kill the tsar, about which they were sworn to secrecy. Nothing at that stage was said about killing the family or servants. To prevent a repetition of the
fraternization that had occurred under Avdeev, Yurovsky chose mainly foreigners. Nicholas noted in his diary on 8 July that "new
Latvians are standing guard", describing them as
Letts – a term commonly used in Russia to classify someone as of European, non-Russian origin. The leader of the new guards was Adolf Lepa, a
Lithuanian. In mid-July 1918, forces of the
Czechoslovak Legion were closing on Yekaterinburg, to protect the
Trans-Siberian Railway, of which they had control. According to historian David Bullock, the Bolsheviks, falsely believing that the Czechoslovaks were on a mission to rescue the family, panicked and executed their wards. The Legions arrived less than a week later and on 25 July captured the city. During the imperial family's imprisonment in late June,
Pyotr Voykov and
Alexander Beloborodov, president of the Ural Regional Soviet, directed the smuggling of letters written in French to the Ipatiev House. These claimed to be by a monarchist officer seeking to rescue the family, but were composed at the behest of the
Cheka. These fabricated letters, along with the Romanov responses to them (written on either blank spaces or the envelopes), provided the Central Executive Committee (CEC) in Moscow with further justification to 'liquidate' the imperial family. Yurovsky later observed that, by responding to the faked letters, Nicholas "had fallen into a hasty plan by us to trap him".
Planning for the murders The Ural Regional Soviet agreed in a meeting on 29 June that the entire Romanov family should be executed. Filipp Goloshchyokin arrived in Moscow as a representative of the Soviet on 3 July with a message insisting on the Tsar's execution. Only
seven of the 23 members of the Central Executive Committee were in attendance, three of whom were Lenin, Sverdlov and
Felix Dzerzhinsky. The killing of the Tsar's wife and children was also discussed, but it was kept a state secret to avoid any political repercussions; German ambassador
Wilhelm von Mirbach made repeated enquiries to the Bolsheviks concerning the family's well-being. Another diplomat, British consul
Thomas Preston, who lived near the Ipatiev House, was often pressured by Pierre Gilliard, Sydney Gibbes and
Prince Vasily Dolgorukov to help the Romanovs; Preston's requests to be granted access to the family were consistently rejected. Goloshchyokin reported back to Yekaterinburg on 12 July with a summary of his discussion about the Romanovs with Moscow, On 14 July, Yurovsky was finalizing the disposal site and how to destroy as much evidence as possible at the same time. He was frequently in consultation with Peter Ermakov, who was in charge of the disposal squad and claimed to know the outlying countryside. Yurovsky wanted to gather the family and servants in a small, confined space from which they could not escape. The basement room chosen for this purpose had a barred window which was nailed shut to muffle the sound of shooting and in case of any screaming. Shooting and stabbing them at night while they slept or killing them in the forest and then dumping them into the Iset pond with lumps of metal weighted to their bodies were ruled out. Yurovsky's plan was to perform an efficient execution of all 11 prisoners simultaneously, although he also took into account that he would have to prevent those involved from raping the women or searching the bodies for jewels. There is no documentary record of an answer from Moscow, although Yurovsky insisted that an order from the CEC to go ahead had been passed on to him by Goloshchyokin at around 7 pm. This claim was consistent with that of a former Kremlin guard, Aleksey Akimov, who in the late 1960s stated that Sverdlov instructed him to send a telegram confirming the CEC's approval of the 'trial' (code for execution) but required that both the written form and
ticker tape be returned to him immediately after the message was sent. Yurovsky and Pavel Medvedev collected 14 handguns to use that night: two Browning pistols (one M1900 and one M1906), two Colt
M1911 pistols, two
Mauser C96s, one
Smith & Wesson, and seven
Belgian-made Nagants. The Nagant operated on old black
gunpowder which produced a good deal of smoke and fumes;
smokeless powder was only just being phased in. In the commandant's office, Yurovsky assigned victims to each killer before distributing the handguns. He took a Mauser and Colt while Ermakov armed himself with three Nagants, one Mauser and a bayonet; he was the only one assigned to kill two prisoners (Alexandra and Botkin). Yurovsky instructed his men to "shoot straight at the heart to avoid an excessive quantity of blood and get it over quickly." At least two of the Letts, an
Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war named Andras Verhas and Adolf Lepa, himself in charge of the Lett contingent, refused to shoot the women. Yurovsky sent them to the Popov House for failing "at that important moment in their revolutionary duty". Neither Yurovsky nor any of the killers went into the logistics of how to efficiently destroy eleven bodies. ==Murders==