Ipatiev House

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Ipatiev House (Russian: Дом Ипатьева) was a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg where the former Emperor Nicholas II of Russia and several members of his family and household were executed following the Bolshevik Revolution. Ironically, its name is identical with that of the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma, from where the Romanovs came to the throne.

In the 1880s, Ivan Redikortsev, an official involved in the mining industry, commissioned a two-story house to be built on the slope of a prominent hill. The length of the facade was 31 metres. In 1898, the mansion passed to Sharaviev, a gold dealer of tainted reputation. Ten years later, the house was acquired by Nikolai Nikolayevich Ipatiev, a military engineer, who turned the ground floor into his office. It seems to have been on the basis of information supplied by Peter Voikov that Ipatiev was summoned to the office of the Ural Soviet at the end of April 1918 and ordered to vacate what was soon to be called "The House of Special Purpose."

The Romanov family moved in on 30 April and spent 78 days at the house. The Emperor, his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse, their four daughters (Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia, Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia and Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia), their son, (Tsarevich Alexei of Russia), and their Doctor Eugene Botkin, lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova, cook Ivan Kharitonov, and footman Alexei Trupp, were shot there by a squad of Bolshevik secret police under the Cheka chief Yakov Yurovsky, on July 16/July 17, 1918.

The execution squad comprised four Russian bolsheviks and seven soldiers. These soldiers were Hungarians, prisoners-of-war who didn't speak Russian. As communists they had joined the 1st Kamyshov Rifle Regiment of the Red Army. They were chosen because the local Cheka feared that Russian soldiers would not shoot at the Tsar and his family, particularly at his daughters. One of them was called Imre Nagy. Some claim that he was identical with Imre Nagy^[1] who later became Prime Minister of Hungary and was executed after the crushing of the anti-Soviet revolution of 1956 by the Red Army. This theory is supported by several Russian historians, but it is generally dismissed by Hungarian experts. Although Imre Nagy was living in Siberia in 1918, the name is very frequent among Hungarians.^[2]

Image:Yekaterinburg cathedral on the blood 2007.jpg

Yekaterinburg's "Church on the Blood," built on the spot where the Ipatiev House once stood.

As early as 1923, the photographs of the fenced house were disseminated in the Soviet press under the label of "the last palace of the last Tsar". In 1927, the house was designated a branch of the Ural Revolution Museum. The visitors were shown a basement where the royal family was executed. The museum was closed down in 1932. In 1977, Boris Yeltsin, the first secretary of the region, received orders from Moscow to demolish the Ipatiev House, and the order was carried out on July 27, 1977. [1] The "Church on the Blood" was built there after the fall of the Soviet Union.