Ipatiev House

Ipatiev House was a two-story merchant's house on a hillside in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural region of Russia, built in the 1880s for the mining official Ivan Redikortsev. It later passed to a gold dealer named Sharaviev and, in 1908, to the military engineer Nikolai Nikolayevich Ipatiev, who used the ground floor as his office. The facade ran 31 metres. In April 1918 the Ural Soviet ordered Ipatiev to vacate it and used it as the House of Special Purpose, where the abdicated Tsar Nicholas II and his family were held for 78 days and were executed in July 1918. The house shared its name with the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma, where the Romanov dynasty had come to the throne, a coincidence of the name only. The Politburo ordered it demolished in 1977, so it no longer stands.