Of course, there was a multiplicity of factors that brought down the Romanov Dynasty and ushered in the communist movement.  As we talked about in Statistics, there is always any number of other variables that come into play.  One of the primary ones, however, was the random accident of a minuscule defective gene.

Without the hemophiliac illness of the czarevich, it is doubtful that there would have been Rasputin’s influence.  Without Rasputin, would Lenin have been able to gain a foothold?  Without its initial seeming success in Russia, would China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and other South American countries have followed suit?  Possibly. Who knows.

Cataclysmic events generally begin with a tiny catalyst seemingly insignificant to the rest of the world.  As we have seen, however, it can trigger and then escalate into the domino effect that has far reaching echoes.

The same afternoon that Nicholas arrived home, revolutionary soldiers in three unauthorized armored cars came to take him to a cell at the fortress of Peter and Paul.  Fortunately, the palace officers dissuaded them as long as the soldiers were permitted to “inspect” Citizen Romanov.  He was paraded before the surly bunch.  Reluctantly they agreed to leave.

After midnight another group of soldiers exhumed Raputin’s remains from the nearby chapel, placed it on a pile of logs with gasoline and burned it throughout the night.  This was the ultimate indignity in the Orthodox Church, desecration of the human body.  From upstairs windows Nicholas and Alexandra witnessed the grisly scene.

Tatiana and Anastasia developed nasty ear abscesses and Marie had pneumonia as complications of measles.  The soldiers insisted on accompanying the doctor when he visited the sick rooms.  The soldiers were both curious and suspicious of every move made by the now small compliment of people surrounding the family.  When the children recovered well enough, lessons began with tutoring spread among the adults.

Next, the Minister of Justice Kerensky made an arrogant arrival to interrogate the couple for their “treasonous” activities.   He separated Nicholas from the family for eighteen days.  Permitted to be reunited only at meals and prayers the family was guarded at all times.  Russian only must be spoken.  Nicholas and Alexandra answered the questions with candor and always maintained their courteous composure, sometimes with good humor.  Over time, Kerensky and Nicholas even became friendly.

The soldiers were concerned that rescue attempts would be made but actually hatred raged across the country against the family at Tsarskoe Selo.  Kerensky was more concerned that the crowds would demand Nicholas be put on trial and executed.  As Minister of Justice, Kerensky did not learn anything incriminating from his extensive examinations.

When he returned to St. Petersburg, Kerensky abolished capital punishment and began covert preparations to get the family out of the country.  The Soviet and the Provisional Government were at odds over the matter.  Oddly enough, Nicholas opposed Kerensky’s position on the death penalty even though he himself could be subject to it.  The ex-czar felt it would weaken discipline in the military.

Originally, England was prepared to take the family but began to back-peddle, especially since the Prime Minister David Lloyd George heartily approved of the revolution.  Eventually even King George V, Nicholas cousin, declined to interfere.  France too wanted no part of the former Imperial Family.  Both England and France cited “internal politics”.  The United States never commented at all.

The entire world was well aware of what had befallen the autocracy of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette a century before.  Nicholas and Alexandra had no illusions about what their fate might be.

The confinement at Tsarskoe Selo lasted five months.   In spite of being subjected to innumerable indignities, the family maintained exquisite honor and courage whenever insulted.  They were permitted to go outdoors into a small area of the Imperial Park for brief daily periods of exercise.  Nicholas busied himself cutting trees, stripping and stacking neat piles for firewood.  The weary ex-monarch, for the first time in twenty-three years, had no dispatches to reply to, no ministers to confer with, and no grave responsibilities for decisions to be made affecting millions of people.  He was relieved and content to spend his time with his family and chop wood.

One day Alexandra was sitting on a blanket on the grass and a soldier unceremoniously plunked himself down beside her.  She was startled and somewhat alarmed at first, but soon they were engaged in quiet conversation.  To his astonishment, he found her to be no different from any ordinary Russian woman, concerned for her husband and children.  Initially rude and coarse, many of the soldiers gained respect and even affection for their captives.  The Imperial Family reciprocated.

In May, a Colonel Kobylinsky was assigned as commander of the garrison at Tsarskoe Selo.  He was a professional soldier and had been wounded twice at the front in the war.  He was with the family for twelve months and felt it was his duty to insulate them from abuse as much as possible.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as we have seen, was a professional Marxist revolutionary, two years younger than Nicholas.  Lenin was in Switzerland and anxious to get back to Russia after a ten year exile. He was afraid the monarchy would be restored.  Yet he was fearful of arrest and/or transport through the North and Baltic Seas because of German U-boats.

Now, this turn of treacherous events is incredible!  The Germans made covert arrangements for Lenin and a contingent of Bolsheviks to travel in a secret train across Germany to Sweden, then Finland and on into Russia.  The German motive?  Russia’s Provisional Government was continuing the war.  Lenin’s return would at the very least stir up further unrest that could only benefit Germany.  In return Lenin promised the Germans to make peace.  He arrived in St. Petersburg to great fanfare.  He began a vigorous campaign against the Provisional Government and the war, still hammering away with Marxist theory and rhetoric.

Trotsky, who had been living and writing in New York, returned and joined forces with Lenin to marshal support for their radical but at that time minority ideas.  Stalin had returned in March from three years of Siberian exile.  He and Molotov were editing the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda.  Soon the public outcry forced the Provisional Government ministers to resign one by one.

Kerensky found himself in the exact same position that Nicholas had been the previous year.  In addition to being Minister of Justice he became Minister of War.

In July the Allies were pressuring Kerensky to launch another major offensive.  Now supplied with an infusion of money from the United States and arms from Britain and France, the Russian army made remarkable advances in two weeks.  The nation rejoiced and danced in the streets. Unfortunately, the Germans counter-attacked with reserve reinforcements.  Whole divisions of the Soldiers’ Committees balked and Russia once more was in retreat.

In what came to be known as the first Bolshevik uprising, an enormous crowd marched through the streets of St. Petersburg protesting against the war and the Provisional Government.  Kerensky put down the revolt by storming the office of Pravda and Lenin’s headquarters along with circulating rumors that Lenin was a German spy.  Trotsky was arrested.  Lenin disguised himself and escaped back to Finland.

The revolutionary fervor was by far stronger in St. Petersburg than anywhere else in Russia.  Kerensky became convinced that it was imperative to get the Imperial Family to a safer location somewhere in Russia.

Nicholas had always expected to go to Livadia.  But to get there, they would have to travel a thousand miles in secret through a number of large cities.  No small undertaking where peasants were on the rampage against landowners.  Kerensky finally decided on the remote town of Tobolsk, across the Urals on the western Siberian Tura River.

August 12, Alexis thirteenth birthday, found the family packing and preparing to leave. Kerensky had managed to keep their departure a deep secret.  Only four others in the Provisional Government knew of the plan.

At 5:00 in the morning, August 14, the family boarded a train that was disguised as a Japanese Red Cross Mission train.  Their entourage consisted of six officers and three-hundred-and-thirty men.  Personal attendants of Nicholas and Alexandra were “two valets, six chambermaids, ten footmen, three cooks, four assistant cooks, a butler, a wine steward, a nurse, a clerk, a barber and two pet spaniels.”₂₃

The journey took four days across the mountains onto the sprawling plains.  They arrived in Tyumen, a town on the Tura River where they boarded a river steamer for the final two-day voyage to Tobolsk.   From the deck along the way they passed through Rasputin’s village, Pokrovskoe, the site of many of his fanciful tales told to the children.  His two-story house stood out among the cluster of peasant hovels.

The stay in Tobolsk turned out to be reasonably pleasant for eight months.  The Imperial Family was confined to the governor’s house and a small area high-fenced from the outside, but the rest of the entourage was allowed to live and go about freely in the town.  The impact of the revolution had not yet reached Tobolsk.  The people of the town were still loyal to the czar, extending every courtesy to their unexpected guests.

In September two Social Revolutionary civil commissars, Vasily Pankratov and Alexander Nikolsky, arrived.  They had both spent years of exile in Siberia because of their political activities.  Nikolsky was the more bitter and vengeful of the two.  They embarked upon political education of the soldiers and succeeded in transforming many of them into not Social Revolutionaries but Bolsheviks.

Kerensky’s Provisional Government was losing ground to the growing Bolshevik movement.  In September, the Bolsheviks attained a majority within the St. Petersburg Soviet.  In late October, Lenin again slipped back into St. Petersburg, clean-shaven and disguised with a blond wig.  For his headquarters he commandeered the house of Mathilde Kschessinaska, the ballerina and Nicholas’ former paramour.

Soon the Bolshevik take over was in full spate.  The Provisional Government collapsed.  Despite later Bolshevik propaganda that the November Revolution was an epic triumph of heroism, it was actually a bloodless coup.  Kerensky went south to try and recruit help from the army, to no avail and vanished from Russia.  He ultimately turned up in the United States.

The Siberian winter was 65 degrees below zero.  A number of the older soldiers guarding the Imperial Family were demobilized and replaced by younger ones infused with revolutionary zeal.  The Provisional Government had provided large sums of money for Kobylinsky to maintain the family and pay the soldiers. When the Bolsheviks took over, the funds ended.

Knowing the plight of the family, a number of monarchists in St. Petersburg raised money to be sent to them.  Of course none of it ever reached Tobolsk.  As the few clothing they brought from Tsarskoe Selo became threadbare, Alexandra knitted socks for Alexis and the girls sewed and mended.  By then, Olga was 22, Tatiana 20, Marie 18 and Anastasia 16.  As life went on in Tobolsk, the girls and especially Alexis could hear other young people and children playing outside their confinement.  They could only wistfully watch and hear the merriment from upstairs windows.

In March a telegram announced that the Romanov family was to be put on soldiers’ rations.  It was necessary to discharge ten of the servants, some of whom had brought their families with them.  Their loyalty to the czar had stranded them in Siberia with no means of livelihood.  The kind townspeople of Tobolsk began to bring food to the isolated Imperial Family.

There was still no official Bolshevik Government represented in Tobolsk.  An escape could have been arranged fairly easily and a number of attempts were planned by monarchists’ organizations.  Some of them were even communicated to Nicholas, as it was easy to get messages through the lax security of the soldiers.

No one seemed to take charge of carrying through the escape plans however.  That is, until Boris Soloviev, Rasputin’s son-in-law came on the scene.  Soloviev was an opportunistic scoundrel cut from the same cloth as his infamous father-in-law.  He had studied mysticism and hypnosis.  Wandering around in the Occult circles of St. Petersburg, he had met and married Rasputin’s daughter, Maria.  In Tobolsk he made contact with Alexandra through her maid, Romanova, who lived in town.

Alexandra, again, became convinced that his organization, dubbed “The Brotherhood of St. John of Tobolsk” would affect an escape.  Soloviev made his headquarters in Tyumen, not Tobolsk, that way he could intercept any persons and funds being sent.  He eventually persuaded supporters in St. Petersburg and Moscow that he had aligned a number of regiments of the Red soldiers to carry out the “rescue” plan, so no more men needed to be sent, only money.  Of course, nothing ever came of it.

Soloviev himself escaped across Siberia to Vladivostock and ultimately Berlin, Germany.  He let it be known to the Russian community there that he was the man who tried to save the Imperial Family.  With their compatriot support, he became a restaurant manager for a time.  His wife, Maria, became a lion tamer and toured Europe and the United States as the mad monk Rasputin’s daughter. They settled finally in Los Angeles.

With spring and hopes of rescue, all was dashed when Alexis again fell and began hemorrhaging in the groin, the worst episode since Spala five years before.  He grew very thin.  Without Rasputin’s prayers of intervention Alexandra despaired.  She and the family could only tend to him and try to ease his tortuous pain.  Alexis was never able to walk again.

Civil War loomed in Russia. To retain his tenuous power, Lenin had but one choice, to make peace.  The Bolsheviks own propaganda against the war spurred soldiers to desert by the thousands.  The German army was making progress toward St. Petersburg.  Lenin moved the capital to Moscow.  More than anything, Lenin wanted to save the revolution and prevent the restoration of the monarchy since he was convinced that the revolution would spread to Germany soon anyway.

The Brest-Litovask Treaty was signed on March 3, 1918.  Lenin paid a heavy price for his peace.  Russia forfeited the Crimea, the Ukraine, most of the Caucasus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland and Poland; thus relinquishing land held since Peter the Great.  Sixty million people, a third of the population of Russia, lived in those regions.

Nicholas was appalled when he heard the news of the treaty.  For the first time he bitterly regretted his abdication.

Nicholas was at once a valuable pawn to Kaiser “Willie” if he could somehow persuade the ex-emperor to sanction the treaty.  The Bolsheviks were determined to keep Nicholas out of German reach.

Moscow sent a new commissar, Vsaily Vaslevich Yakovlev and 150 men with orders directly from Jacob Sverdlov demanding strict compliance of Koblylinsky and his troops under pain of court-martial and death.   Sverdlov was a high-ranking Bloshevik close to Lenin.

Yakovlev was to take the family to an undisclosed location.  When he found Alexis far too ill to travel, he fired off a number of secure telegraph messages to Moscow.  He had brought a private telegrapher with him.  Then, in no uncertain terms, he ordered Nicholas alone to go.  Nicholas flatly refused.  Yakovlev threatened to take him by force.

After much discussion it was decided that Alexandra and Marie would go with Nicholas and the rest of the family would join them as soon as Alexis was able to travel.  They had no idea of their destination but presumed it was to Moscow to coerce Nicholas into endorsing the hated Brest-Litovask Treaty.   They thought the Bolsheviks would try to pressure Nicholas, as they held his family hostage.

Alexandra was beside herself with anxiety at leaving Alexis and had one hissi-fit after another at the very idea.  He had passed the crisis, was no longer hemorrhaging, and was at the stage of suffering through his lengthy recovery.  The girls and the rest of the group assured Alexandra they would take good care of the boy.  After all, they had had plenty of experience with Alexis’ illness. They fervently prayed they would be reunited soon.

The desolate Alexis and his other frightened sisters were left alone in Tobolsk.  Nicholas and his party were bundled into carriages, more like peasant carts, for the two hundred-mile-journey over melting ice and mud to Tyumen.  When they reached Tyumen, Yakovlev spent a great deal of time in the telegraph office.  He was under the impression that he was to take them to Moscow.

Their route would take them through Ekaterinburg, a revolutionary hotbed since even before the Bolshevik take-over.  He knew the local Soviet there would stop the train and take the prisoners.  Without specific orders, he decided to head eastward instead to the more-friendly Omsk and then double back by a different route to Moscow.  (Thousands of miles east of Omsk, the Pacific Ocean.)

Telegrams flew back and forth between Tyumen, Ekaterinburg and Omsk.  Before they reached Omsk, armed soldiers stopped the train.  Yakovlev sent more telegrams but finally had to give in to Sverdlov's demand that he take the prisoners to Ekaterinburg and hand them over to the Ural Soviet there.

Later some Bolsheviks claimed that Yakovlev was a monarchist agent trying to help the captives escape.  More likely, though Yakovlev was a decent officer, and following Sverdlov’s orders, was trying to avoid Ekaterinburg to get the Imperial Family to Moscow safely by a more circuitous route.

An ominous plot was being hatched as incredible diplomatic shenanigans were being played out.  The Allies were preoccupied with the war in the West and had forgotten all about the former czar and his family.  The only foreign power in a position to aid Nicholas was “Willie”.  The Germans became aware of the deadly virus they had turned loose in Russia when they helped Lenin return.  The Marxist-Lenin doctrine was well known throughout the world and had a large, vocal, and dangerous contingent within Germany herself.

The German economy was near exhaustion from the protracted war.  If “Willie” could topple the Red regime and restore the monarchy in Russia, he thought Nicholas and his following would be grateful to the Kaiser.  He was not proud of his pact with the Bolsheviks and was not sure it was even valid.  “Willie” still seemed to think he could influence Nicholas.  The Imperial Family was more than eight hundred miles from Moscow.  Germany would have no compunction about breaking the Brest-Litovask Treaty, and storming Moscow if Nicholas were brought to the capital.

Count William Mirbach, the German ambassador to Russia, embarked on an elaborate wicked game of chess.  It was Mirbach who persuaded Sverdlov with a two-edged sword to bring Nicholas back to Moscow.  The ex-czar would be useful to the Bolsheviks by approving the treaty but the ambassador also issued a veiled threat that if Nicholas were not returned, there could be military consequences.

Sverdlov played along with Mirbach with no intentions of letting Nicholas fall into German hands.  Initially, Yakovlov was probably not privy to the nefarious schemes afoot.  He was just a young officer carrying out orders from above.  He was only thirty-two.  When the train was stopped in Omsk, he had no choice but to go on to Ekaterinburg.  There he was arrested but released since he was Sverdlov’s deputy.  Yakovlov later defected to the White Army’s counter-revolutionary forces.

Sverdlov pleaded innocent to Mirbach, claiming that extremists in Ekaterinburg had hijacked the train and the Bolshevik Central Committee was not yet powerful enough to control distant areas.  Mirbach was infuriated that he had been outwitted.

It is interesting how a lie can produce more lies.  If dishonorable men lie sometimes honorable men perpetuate the lies by believing them.  Soon the lies are generally perceived as truths.

The name of Ekaterinburg was subsequently changed to “Sverdlovsk” and became a large industrial city.  The United States pilot, Gary Powers in his U-2 spy plane, was shot down over Sverdlovsk in 1960.  (Incidentally, Nicholas had changed the name of St. Petersburg to Petrograd to make it more Russian.  Then Lenin changed it to Leningrad.  That city is now back to St. Petersburg, although the capital remains in the ancient capital of Moscow.  Peter the Great had moved the capital to St. Petersburg when he built that city on the marshes of the Neva River.)

“Willie” and Mirbach gave up on Nicholas and tried another tactic.  They sent an agent to the Crimea where some of the grand dukes were.  They proposed that if any one of the Romanovs in line of succession would sanction the treaty, Germany would guarantee the restoration of the monarchy.  Naturally, the offer was greeted with scorn.  The same proposition might have been suggested to Prince Felix Yussoupov, one of Rasputin’s murderers.  Again, nothing came of it.

In July Mirbach was assassinated in Moscow.  By November the war was over with Germany defeated by the Allies.  Before he could abdicate, “Willie” was dethroned and exiled by his own Chancellor, Hindenburg.  Emperor William II retired in comfort to Holland in the village of Doorn until his death in 1941 at the age of 82.  The Netherlands declined requests from the Allies for his extradition.