Recreated in 3D: the basement room where the Russian royals were murdered

It was here in a cellar room with striped wallpaper that abdicated Tsar Nicholas II, his empress Alexandra and their five children were shot dead on the night of 16-17 July 1918. 

The house in Yekaterinburg had been their home as captives of the Bolsheviks for 78 days after a period when they were held in Siberia after the two revolutions of 1917. 

In 1977 the house was razed on the orders of Boris Yeltsin, then the local Communist Party head, who would later be the first president of the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union; Mocow had become concerned that it was seen as a place of pilgrimage for Soviet citizens. 

But now it has been brought back in minute detail with a 3-dimensional computer mock-up on a 50-inch screen which lets you walk around the historic building.

Their medic Dr Botkin had been ordered by Soviet guards to wake the royals, and they were told - falsely - that they were to be evacuated from the city because the White forces were nearing Yekaterinburg. 

The Romanovs, Botkin and the three servants were led down a flight of stairs, into the courtyard of the Ipatiev House - which belonged to a railway merchant before the revolution -  and then through a ground-floor entrance to the small semi-basement room at the rear of the building. 

Chairs were brought for Nicholas and Alexandra at the latter's request. 

The remainder of the party stood behind and to one side of the seated couple, except for the frail former crown prince Alexei who sat on his father's lap.

Commander Yakov Yurovsky, a senior member of the Ural Soviet, and a party of armed men entered the basement room through the double doors.

Yurovsky told them that their relatives had attempted to save the Imperial family, that this attempt had failed and that the Soviets were now obliged to shoot them all. 

He and his squad then opened fire with pistols on the prisoners. In chaotic scenes, bullets bounced off the princesses who had diamonds and jewellery sewn into their clothing. 

Astonishingly it took up to 30 minutes to kill the group group. 

Today the Church-on-the-Blood was built on the spot where the Ipatiev House once stood.

Nikolai Neuymin, head of the Romanov history department of the Sverdlovsk regional local history museum, said: 'The employees of our museum developed the 3D reconstruction of the house of engineer Ipatiev. This is where the Church-on-the-Blood is built now.

'A particular feature of the project is that we've used real photos from the investigation of [Nikolai] Sokolov that is kept at Russia's State Archive.

'We recreated the interiors of the rooms, and you can walk through all of them including the gloomy room where the tsar family were shot dead.'