[The following is from an account of a neighbor across the street from the House of Special Purpose (Ipatev’s House), where the Russian Imperial family was lined up against the wall of the basement and shot by the local Bolsheviks in 1918.]
One of the witnesses who testified for Sokolov, a resident of Popov’s house across the street, where the external guard was billeted, recalled:
I can reconstruct well the night from the 16th to the 17th in my memory because that night I couldn’t get a wink of sleep. I recall that around midnight I went into the yard and approached the shed. I felt unwell and stopped. A while later I heard distant volleys. There were some fifteen of them, followed by separate shots: there were three or four of those, but they did not come from rifles. It was after 2 a.m. The shots came from Ipatev’s house; they sounded muffled as if coming from a basement. After this, I quickly returned to my room, for I was afraid that the guards of the house where the ex-Emperor was held prisoner could see me from above.
When I returned, my next-door neighbor asked: “Did you hear?”
I answered: “I heard shots.”
”Get it?”
”Yes, I get it,” I said, and we fell silent.
Source:
Pipes, Richard. "The Murder of the Imperial Family." The Russian Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1990. 776-77. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Sokolov, Ubiistvo, 219.
Further Reading:
[Николай Алексеевич Соколов (Nikolay Alekseevich Sokolov)]( https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2,_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B9_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87_(%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C)
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