Ivan Sednev

Ivan Sednev (Ivan Dmitrievich Sednev) was a footman of the children of Tsar Nicholas II and was shot at Yekaterinburg in 1918, at the age of 36, because he stayed faithful to the imperial family. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia counted him in 1981 among the servants of the imperial family killed by the Soviet regime.

He was born on 22 September (4 October) 1881 in the village of Sverchkovo, in the Yaroslavl province, into a peasant family. He could read and worked in a paper factory. At the end of 1903 he was drafted into the Baltic fleet, entered the Guards Crew and sailed on the imperial yachts Polar Star and Standart. In April 1909 he entered the service of the court as footman to the tsar's children, on the recommendation of his friend Klementy Nagorny. He was both an attendant and a protector of the children. The empress called him "good Sednev". He was married to Maria Alekseevna Chistyakova and had three children: Lyudmila, Olga and Dmitry.

In August 1917 he chose to stay with the dethroned family and go with it into exile, to Tobolsk and then to Yekaterinburg. With Nagorny he stood up against the guards who stole the family's belongings and insulted the prisoners. On 15 (28) May 1918 both were taken out of the Ipatiev House and led to prison, where they were held in a shared cell.

According to some sources at the beginning of June, according to others at the beginning of July 1918, they were taken outside the city and shot in the back "for betraying the cause of the revolution". A newspaper published on 7 July the list of hostages shot. The bodies were found by the Whites and buried on 10 August 1918 at the church of All Sorrows; the graves were destroyed in Soviet times. Ivan Sednev was rehabilitated in October 2009 by the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia, among 52 persons close to the imperial family.