Bloody Ekaterinburg

Nestled in the middle Urals, dividing Russian Asia from Europe, Ekaterinburg was founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1723 and named for his wife, the future Empress Catherine I. The legend says that, a year later, he punished her infidelity by beheading her lover and installing the disembodied bean in a jar on her nightstand. Fitting then, that Ekaterinburg, the city of many names [Ekaterinburg, Yekaterinburg, Sverdlosk], the capital of the Urals, the birthplace of Russian industry, has such a bloody, tumultuous history.

Americans addicted to the History Channel will know Ekaterinburg as the site of the assassination of the Romanovs, the last of the Russian monarchs. At the outbreak of the revolution in February 1917, Nicholas II was arrested and exiled to the Siberian city of Tobolsk. By August 1918, civil war was at a fever pitch, with the Red Army (Bolsheviks) and White Army (Mensheviks) capturing city after another. When the Mensheviks took Ekaterinburg, the Bolsheviks feared that Nicholas would be freed, so they opted to have him and the Romanov lineage eliminated. On July 16, 1918 the entire family - Nicholas, wife Alexandra and their five children Tatiana, Alexei, Maria, Olga and Anastasia - were murdered in Dom Ipatiev, a house in Ekaterinburg.

The disposal of the bodies borders on the tragic, the macabre and the messy. It has since been determined, after years of secrecy, what ghoulish bungling transpired in the aftermath. They were dumped in an abandoned mine 16 kilometers away, followed by a couple of grenades intended to collapse the mine shaft (which didn't). The bodies were yanked back out, and an acids expert was summoned, who transported 200 liters of a sulfuric/nitric acid mixture but, en route, fell off his horse, breaking his leg and rendering him useless. They then opted to distribute the bodies to several smaller mines and pour acid on them but the cart carrying them got trapped in the boggy swamps. Now desperate they opted to bury them on the spot, first trying in vain to burn the bodies, then poured acid on them which instead soaked right into the ground. The remains were finally uncovered 73 years later.

In 1977, then-governer and local hero Boris Yeltsin had Dom Ipatiev destroyed. Today the site is marked by the majestic, powerful Cathedral on the Blood as the Romanovs have now been canonized as saints.

During the Cold War, this was the area where US spy plane pilot Gary Powers was shot down, detained and exhanged for a Soviet spy in 1962. In 1979, an anthrax leak from a biological weapons plant killed 64 civilians in the city.

After being plagued by 1990s Mafia wars, the city now enjoys a major economic and construction boom. The Urals, being one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet, are not particularly impressive looking but contain some of the most important and valuable minerals on the planet. Indeed, while digging during the construction of the city's Metro system in the 1990s, enough gold was discovered to pay for the entire project.