Ivan Kharitonov

Ivan Mikhailovich Kharitonov was a cook in the household of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia. He was born in 1870 in Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire, and entered the culinary service of the imperial court, preparing meals for the emperor, Empress Alexandra, and their children at Tsarskoye Selo and other residences. After the February Revolution of 1917 and Nicholas II’s abdication, the family was placed under house arrest. Many members of the large court staff left; Kharitonov was among those who remained. In August 1917 the former imperial family and a reduced suite were sent into internal exile at Tobolsk in western Siberia. There he continued to cook for them under the constraints of captivity and dwindling resources.

In the spring of 1918 the Bolshevik authorities transferred Nicholas, Alexandra, and Grand Duchess Maria to Yekaterinburg; the remaining children and a handful of attendants followed. Kharitonov was allowed to stay with them in the Ipatiev House, a requisitioned merchant’s residence used as their prison. Conditions were severe: windows were whitewashed, the guard regime was harsh, and food was limited to what the Ural Soviet permitted. As cook he worked with those rations for the family and the few remaining staff. By July 1918 he was one of only four non-family members still with the Romanovs, together with the court physician Eugene Botkin, the parlormaid Anna Demidova, and the footman Alexei Trupp.

On the night of 16–17 July 1918 the prisoners were awakened, told they were being moved, and led to a basement room of the Ipatiev House, where a squad under Yakov Yurovsky shot them. Kharitonov was killed with the imperial family and the other three retainers. The bodies were taken by truck to a forest in the Koptyaki district, partly burned, and buried in a concealed pit. The grave was located in the late Soviet period and excavated in 1991. Forensic work in the 1990s identified Kharitonov among the nine sets of remains (Nicholas, Alexandra, three daughters, and the four servants) interred with state honors in the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on 17 July 1998.

In 1981 the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified the imperial family and their murdered attendants, including Kharitonov, as new martyrs. He is commemorated on 17 July with the Holy Royal Passion-Bearers. The Moscow Patriarchate’s glorification of the imperial family as passion-bearers in 2000 did not then include the servants. Kharitonov is venerated especially in the ROCOR tradition as a layman who remained with the family until death. He was married and the father of children; members of his family survived the revolution, and later descendants have taken part in commemorations of the Yekaterinburg victims. He held no episcopal or patriarchal office and belonged to no religious order.