In Ekaterinburg, the royal family lodged in the Ipatiev villa, surrounded by a palisade so high that from inside you could not see the tops of the trees growing outside. A few days after the arrival of the family members, the jailers paint the tiles of their rooms white.
It is in this house that in June, Tsarina Alexandra (46 years old), Tatiana (21 years old), Maria (19 years old) and Anastasia (17 years old) celebrate their birthdays. On July 14, a local priest, Father Storozhev, is required to celebrate a mass; he is one of the last people to see the family alive. Three days later, on the night of July 16-17, the Romanovs and their servants were murdered in a basement room of the “special purpose house,” as the jailers called it.
The house was then assigned to other uses:it housed a museum of the Revolution and an anticlerical museum until 1977, as the 60 th approached. anniversary of the October Revolution, when it was decided to demolish it to prevent it from becoming a place of pilgrimage for possible counter-revolutionaries. The order was given by Boris Yeltsin, future president of Russia, then provincial leader of the Communist Party.