The government, however, disregarded all these resolutions and muttered threats. It may very well be, though, that the final decision to send Nicholas and his wife into Siberian exile came as a result of pressure on the part of the soviets. Kerensky may have feared a bloody tragedy at Tsarskoe Selo, and perhaps he had reason to fear it. At all events, the provisional government decided, some time in July, to transfer the family to one of the remotest spots in the empire, Tobolsk, in Eastern Siberia. The government kept this decision an absolute secret, as far as the deposed Emperor as well as the general public were concerned. A few days before the transfer was made one of the soviets, I think at Tsarskoe, held a stormy meeting at which great indignation was expressed over the ease and comfort in which the once royal family lived. “We eat black bread, they eat white,” complained one impassioned orator. “We drink cold water and Nicholas drinks wine. My wife walks while his rides in a carriage. Where’s the justice in that?” Doesn’t it sound like a deliberate plagiarism of one of the speeches made against allowing the sixteenth Louis to remain in the Tuileries? A lot of things have changed since the French revolution, but some human nature is just as small and mean as ever. It was not until the Romanoff family was well on its way to Siberia that the transfer was mentioned in the newspapers. Many people knew of it, of course, and the news was passed from excited lip to lip in the capital a few hours after the special train left Tsarskoe Selo. In the newspapers of August 3 (16, old style) the carefully censored story of the departure was published. The full story, as far as I know it, reveals that for three weeks beforehand the garrison at Tsarskoe knew, or suspected, that something was about to happen to the captives. Two days before the event Kerensky went in person to the garrison and asked the soldiers to choose from their ranks a squadron of the most reliable and trustworthy men. They were needed, he explained, for a mission of great importance. Three hundred and eighty-four men were chosen, eight from forty-eight regimental groups. On the 31st of July (August 12) at midnight Kerensky appeared at the barrack, called the picked men together and told them that their mission was to escort the man who had been their emperor and autocrat into exile in far Siberia.