Alexey Georgievich Kabanov

Alexey Georgievich Kabanov (; 15 October 1890–1972) was a Russian revolutionary, a former member of the Imperial Life Guard turned Bolshevik, member of the Cheka and a participant in the murder of the Romanov family.

Biography

Early life

Kabanov was born in 1890 in the village of Grimino in Rzhevsky Uyezd, part of the Tver Governorate in the Russian Empire. From the peasant class, he worked as a shepherd, then a carpenter. After turning the age of majority, he moved to Saint Petersburg. At an unspecified point, he came to join the Imperial Life Guard and served in a cavalry regiment. After the Russian Revolution, he went over to the Bolsheviks.

In Yekaterinburg

Kabanov later came to work for the Ural Cheka, and after the members of the Imperial Family were brought to Yekaterinburg in the summer of 1918, was assigned to work at the Ipatiev House as the head of the attic machine gun team, who kept watch for possible attacks. The commandant of the "House of Special Purpose" Yakov Yurovsky had apparently selected Kabanov personally when he replaced Alexander Avdeev, who was removed by the order of the Ural Soviet due to lenient and lax behavior. Kabanov's brother, Mikhail Georgievich, was also a Bolshevik who served an important role in Yekaterinburg during its administration by the Ural Soviet as the head of the Yekaterinburg Prison. Regarding the fate of the unfortunate animals, Kabanov later stated: "I also recommended the slaying of the three royal dogs".

After Yekaterinburg

After the massacre, he served for several more years as a Chekist, working in the organs of the Vyatka Cheka. After the end of the civil war, he held various party, legal and economic posts in the Crimea, in particular, he served as the prosecutor of the Feodosia District, and later in the Far East. In Khabarovsk, he was appointed manager of the Union Meat («Союзмясо») Far Eastern Office. At the beginning of the Second World War, he was in charge of the Khabarovsk Trust of Canteens. The Ipatiev House itself was demolished only five years later in 1977 by order of the Politburo as not of "sufficient historical significance". In 1993 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union a criminal case was opened by the Russian government but was subsequently closed on the basis that all of the perpetrators were "long dead".