Tracking Down The Tsar

Yekaterinburg

Managed to find the spot where the Bolsheviks murdered the imperial family without too much bother. During his time as mayor here in the 1970s Boris Yeltsin had the house where it happened demolished so now there's just a plaque and a cross with a few flowers. The tiny wooden chapel nearby used to get burnt down routinely by anti-monarchists but it seems there are more mixed feelings about the Romanovs here these days. There's a big and very grand new cathedral in their honour beside the massacre site. However, it's directly across the road from a statue in honour of the 'Young Communists of the Urals'. This city is still more widely known as Sverdlovsk, a name that comes from the Communist Sverdlov who organised the killings. And the main road is still called Lenin Prospekt complete with an imposing statue of the man himself. It may be 13 years since the USSR broke up, the Tsar and his family may have been long since rehabilitated, but even now you can't escape the Soviets here.

More importantly than all this I've bought a coat, which is at least warm enough to see me through the Siberian September if not exactly the Russian Winter.