Ivan Kharitonov

Saint Ivan Kharitonov (Ivan Mikhailovich Kharitonov), head cook at the court of Tsar Nicholas II, was killed at Yekaterinburg, in the night of 17 July 1918, with the imperial family, and is venerated as a new martyr alongside them. His feast is on 17 July.

Family and service

He was born on 14 June 1870 at Saint Petersburg, the son of Mikhail Kharitonovich Kharitonov (1837-1913), a man left an orphan young who nevertheless achieved much: he became an official of the Ministry of the Imperial Court and received, for merit, the Order of Saint Vladimir and personal nobility. In 1882 his father put him to learn cookery, and Ivan perfected his craft at Paris. In 1888 he was taken into the imperial court as an apprentice cook, then cook of the second rank. From 1891 to 1895 he served in the navy; after returning to court he became head cook of the imperial kitchen. He was an honorary hereditary citizen and received many orders and medals. He was an Orthodox Christian. He married Evgenia Andreevna Tur and they had five children. One of his sons, Peter, was drawn to revolutionary ideas and went over to the Reds, but toward the end of his life changed his views.

Exile with the imperial family

After the February Revolution, Kharitonov replaced the maitre d'hotel of the imperial kitchen, who had left Russia. He followed the Romanov family into internal exile after the Revolution of 1917. In exile he gave the tsar's daughters lessons in bread-⁠making. He did all in his power to cheer his masters with the scanty means at his disposal and often comforted them in sad hours. His wife and daughter followed him into exile at Tobolsk but did not go with him when the Bolsheviks moved the prisoners to Yekaterinburg in the spring of 1918.

The killing

He was shot with the whole imperial family, in the Ipatiev House at Yekaterinburg, in the night of 16 to 17 July 1918, together with the physician Evgeny Botkin, Anna Demidova and Alois Trupp. He died among the first, from the bullets of the firing squad.

Glorification and rehabilitation

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia canonized him, with the family of Nicholas II, as a passion-⁠bearer of Soviet oppression (in some sources in 1981, in others in 1991). The Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, in canonizing the imperial family in 2000, did not mention the servants in its decision, among them Ivan Kharitonov. The canonization commission, headed by Metropolitan Juvenaly, noted that a final decision was not possible on the grounds for canonizing this group of laymen who, by the duty of their court service, accompanied the imperial family during its imprisonment and suffered violent death, and that the most fitting form of honouring the feat of the faithful servants who shared the family's tragic fate is to record it in the life of the Royal Martyrs. On 16 October 2009 the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation decided to rehabilitate 52 persons close to the imperial family, among them Ivan Kharitonov.

His grandson attended the funeral held on 17 July 1998, in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, for his grandfather, the Romanovs, their servants (Anna Demidova and Alois Trupp) and the other victims murdered eighty years before.