Although the details of who exactly ordered the execution and when are incredibly murky and clouded by various political charges, the decision to execute the imperial family in Yekaterinburg was very heavily predicated on exigent factors. The Bolshevik government in Moscow favored putting Nicholas on a show trial, but the events of the Russian Civil War precluded this option. The war created both chaos and a danger that the imperial family would be liberated. Yekaterinburg was in between both Omsk, where a provisional government of various White forces (Kadets, SRs and monarchists) and Samara where the White-allied Czech Legion was operating in 1918. The fear that animated the Romanovs' captors was that any member of the imperial family could be used as a rallying figure for the Whites. Although Moscow had held out hope for the possibility of a trail as late as July, the fear was that White forces would take the decision out of their hands. Whether or not Moscow directly ordered the execution or if the chain of command extended to Lenin himself, or was the decision of the Ural Regional Soviet is still unclear. It is telling though that the first Bolshevik official pronouncements of the execution justified the execution on the basis of advancing Czechoslovak forces and lied by saying only the tsar was executed while his "wife and son have been sent to a secure place." This helped fuel the myth that some of the royal family escaped.