After the successful Bolshevik coup of November 1917, the Petrograd newspapers published a decree summoning all male Romanovs to report to the Cheka, the secret police. Initially they were just required not to leave the city. In March 1918, the Romanovs who registered were summoned again, now to be sent away into internal Russian exile. In the spring of 1918, when the Bolsheviks had initially tried to arrest him, Gabriel was suffering from tuberculosis; rather than imprison him, the Bolsheviks allowed him to stay with his wife, Antonina, at her Petrograd apartment. By the summer of 1918, however, he had recovered, and one day in July, a contingent of armed soldiers arrived at the modest apartment and took him into custody. He was put in Shpalernaya prison in a cell adjoining those of his uncle Dimitri Konstantinovich and Grand Dukes Nicholas Mikhailovich and George Mikhailovich.