(Continued from page 12)

As one faced the Ipatiev House from the street, the room where Russia's three hundred year old Romanov dynasty is said to have ended was halfway along the left side of the building.  The ground sloped gradually to a canopied and arched side entrance and people entering the building through that doorway would have found themselves facing four more sets of doors at the back of the bottom floor.  The double doors opening to the scene of the Imperial murders would have been at their right shoulder.

We can only look at the surviving pictures and imagine this scene because the so-called "House of Special Purpose" and the evidence it contained was destroyed fifty-nine years after the murders on the instructions of a man named Boris Yeltsin on the 27th of July 1977.  His orders to demolish the structure within three days are said to have come from Moscow where Leonid Brezhnev had just taken up the post of the presidency on the sixteenth day of the previous month.  Brezhnev's orders were the result of advice given by then KGB boss Yuri Andropov.

The accepted version of the story says that the commandant Yakov Yurovsky entered the room with ten to twelve revolutionary soldiers behind him.  The exact number varies from story to story and could depend on whether Yurovsky is included or not.  I will make the assumption based on the cumulative evidence that there were twelve men including Yurovsky.

Probably the most well known piece of evidence is an old photograph of the back of the room and the damage that is presumed to have been done to it by the murderous assault of the Bolshevik guards.  Light shines in from the small window that is high and to the right off the edge of the picture and causes the damage on the wall and rubble on the floor to cast short shadows to the left.  Given the room's position in the building, this suggests that the building faces north or north-east and the photo was taken in the morning.  It also means that the Imperial family had been lined up facing the rear of the building with their backs to the street in front.

A double door takes up a little less than half of the width of the wall between two pillars that jut out about a foot and a half into the corners of the room and support a heavy arch in the ceiling.  A similar set of pillars supporting another arch would be on either side of the photographer who is standing in the doorway through which Yurovsky and his fellow assassins entered the room.  More on those pillars later.
©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                                        (Continued on page 14)