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.
[2] During the night of 17 July Kabanov participated in the executions, though he only stayed long enough to fire several shots at the “convicts” before retreating to the attic to man the machine gun turret.
Kabanov soon ran onto the street to check the noise levels and heard the dogs barking from the Romanovs' quarters and the sound of gunshots loud and clear.
[1] According to fellow conspirator Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin, when the corpses were being loaded onto the fiat truck outside, the body of the French Bulldog Ortino, "the last pathetic remnant of the Imperial Family", was brought out on the end of a Red Guardsman's bayonet and unceremoniously hurled onto the fiat, Filipp Goloshchekin, the head of the military commissariat, contemptibly sneered, "Dogs deserve a dog's death", as he glared at the dead tsar.
[1][2] In 1964, having learned from the newspapers about the death of Mikhail Medvedev-Kudrin and his high retirement status, he turned to the Khabarovsk Regional Committee with a request to also appoint him a personal pension, taking into account his own "revolutionary merits".
Regarding these claims, historian Helen Rappaport wrote "Whether that was true or not we shall never know", continuing "What really happened that night at the Ipatiev House was, from the very first, distorted by a systemic web of official lies, confusion, poor memory and disinformation".
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".