Russia: The Czar Who Wouldn’t Die

On the grey, gull-studded morning of Dec. 1, 1825, the Azov seaport of Taganrog echoed to the tolling of death bells. Alexander I, conqueror of Napoleon, keystone of the Holy Alliance, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, was dead at 48. With him had passed the hopes of the peasantry for reforms and freedoms that he had long espoused; after him came an era of intermittent repression and misrule that led finally to the Bolshevik Revolution. But had Alexander really died? Last week in Moscow, a Soviet writer once again exhumed a 140-year-old legend that Alexander faked his death, then took up a 39-year life of humble repentance as a wandering starets (holy man) in Siberia.

Mistresses & Malaria. The legend goes like this. Alexander, never very stable, was haunted by the memory of his murdered father, Paul I, and half-crazed by a sense of guilt for Napoleon’s burning of Moscow. A handsome rakehell, Alexander had latterly fallen under the influence of Baroness Barbara Juliana von Kriüdener, a Baltic Billy Sunday who converted the Czar into a rabid religious mystic. Thus in 1825 he decided to change his life.

In a Crimean hospital, Alexander came across a dying army officer who closely resembled him, even down to a scar on the leg. When the soldier died, Alexander’s physician allowed the body to decompose just enough to blur its features. Meanwhile Alexander took to his bed, ostensibly with malaria or typhoid. When the time was ripe, the corpse was brought up to the Emperor’s room in a covered bathtub; Alexander was smuggled out the same way to a yacht belonging to the first Earl of Cathcart, former British Ambassador to Russia and a close friend of Alexander’s. It slipped quietly out of the harbor the next day, bearing south and east to the Holy Land, where a “mysterious passenger”—ostensibly Alexander-made a tour of sacred shrines. The coffin was opened only once en route to the capital, and then only immediate relatives were permitted to look inside.

Crime & Punishment. There is an eleven-year gap in the legend—until 1836, when a tall stranger with a flowing beard and erect military bearing rode into the Siberian outpost of Krasnoufimsk on a white horse. He carried his right hand on his hip in the manner of the late Czar; he spoke fluent French and a kind of Russian that was half church-Slavic, half Latin; he carried an icon with the initials A.I. The peasants began to wonder if this might not be Alexander the Blessed. When the stranger, who gave his name as Fyodor Kuzmich but could produce no papers to prove it, was sentenced to 20 lashes for vagrancy, a strange thing happened. Out from Moscow rode Grand Duke Michael, Alexander’s younger brother. He personally threatened the judge with a lashing of his own. But after talking privately and reverentially with Kuzmich, Michael relented and left. Other Romanovs visited the holy man: Czarevich Alexander, namesake of his uncle and soon to bear the imperial title, arrived and kissed Kuzmich’s hand.

To Fyodor Kuzmich’s peasant compatriots, there could be no doubt that he was the Czar. He awed them with his humble beekeeping and mysterious tales of life in the czarist court. “When Napoleon was marching on Moscow,” Kuzmich would relate, “the Czar went to pray at the casket of St. Serge of Radonezh. The cathedral was dark, and he was alone. Suddenly he heard a voice: ‘Go, Alexander, and trust your general.’ ” And so Russia won its first patriotic war.

Rumors & Resolve. When Kuzmich died in 1864, believers in the legend noted that Alexander’s aged courtiers finally went into mourning—something they had scrupulously avoided in 1825. Two years later, in 1866, rumors swept the capital that Alexander’s tomb had been opened by night with the Czar’s approval. The supposition: that Kuzmich-Alexander was being returned from his grave in Tomsk to the tomb in the Fortress of Peter and Paul.

Years later an old soldier told one researcher that he had been paid 10,000 rubles to remove a body—apparently that of the fake Alexander—from the tomb and bury it in a small graveyard back of the fortress.

The legend of Alexander’s prolonged life captured the imagination of many obscure historians—and even that of Novelist Leo Tolstoy. In 1905, shortly before his death, Tolstoy began a fictional account titled Posthumous Notes on Fyodor Kuzmich. Another investigator has had better luck with the Soviet regime of Brezhnev and Kosygin. Writing in Izvestia’s Sunday magazine last week, Journalist Lev Lyubimov revealed that the Russian government is pondering a plan to resolve the Alexandrian mystery once and for all. Lyubimov would like to open both Kuzmich’s tomb in Tomsk and Alexander’s in Leningrad.

Whatever the results, it seems unlikely that any definitive answer to the mystery will be forthcoming. But for observers of Soviet society, the renewed interest in Alexander is phenomenon enough. By bringing to public attention the life of a mystic and martyr, a pre-Soviet hero and reformer, Russia’s new bosses are showing a broad-mindedness far greater than that of their predecessors. The resurgence of the Alexander legend shows an acceptance of not only a Czar but an aspect of pro-Bolshevik history that transcends the rigid confines of Marxist-Leninist “truth.”