Ipatiev House
Avdonin, a geologist by trade in the Soviet years, was also personally interested in local history and folklore, which in Sverdlovsk had to include the murder of the Romanovs. Indeed, the Ipatiev House, at 49 Voznesensky Prospekt—the leafy end of the town’s main street—where the family was imprisoned and murdered, was called at the time the House of Special Purpose and maintained for some years afterward as the Museum of the Peoples’ Vengeance. Avdonin gathered information informally for years, and, in 1976, met Soviet writer and filmmaker , who was given information by the son of one of the killers that led them to identify a precise location and to begin informal exhumations. According to the “Yurovsky Note” a primary historical document authored by the commandant of the Ipatiev House and chief executioner Yakov Yurovsky, the bodies (nine of the eleven) were buried at the place where the truck broke down on the second night following the murder, near Grade Crossing 184 on the Koptyaki Road. Pots of acid had been smashed into the pit to consume the naked remains, and railroad ties had been placed over the pit before a layer of earth.