In the late 1920s and 1930s, it was common for the Communist Party apparatchiks (obedient executives who held various state positions) to go to the Ipatiev House in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg) in large tour groups.
There they posed - many of them smiling - in front of the wall with the marks from the bullets with which Tsar Nicholas and his family with four loyal followers had been brutally murdered by an executive detachment of the Bolsheviks in the early morning hours of July 17, 1918.
