The Tsar's Doctor

by Mary McGrigor

  There he worked in a vodka distillery for nearly five years. He got on well with both the management and his fellow workers, all of whom respected his gentle good manners and lack of pretension to be anything other than the starets, or holy man, he claimed to be. Nonetheless a rumour seems to have started that he was not of humble birth, but in fact an aristocrat in hiding from the secret police.

  In 1842 Feodor Kuzmich, as he still insisted he was called, was moved to another place of exile at Beloyarsk.91 There he lived in a hut built for him by a Cossack who befriended him. Soon he became a local celebrity as people, discovering he was knowledgeable about much in the outside world, came to his hut to ask for advice on their problems and for spiritual guidance. Soon he attracted so much attention that the local authorities, apparently afraid of his influence, moved him on elsewhere.

  Kuzmich then travelled around Russia for a period of about eleven years. Wherever he went he became involved with the local people, particularly with the children, with whom he appears to have shared a special bond. He captivated them with his stories and is known to have taught them grammar, history, geography and religion. Despite his formidable appearance they seem to have taken to him instantly and often came clutching little bunches of wild flowers.92 From this it can be taken that, whatever his real identity, Feodor, like Tsar Alexander, was possessed of a captivating charm.

  With older people he also discussed religion and described past events in St Petersburg with great clarity. Occasionally he let things slip, as when some workmen, making repairs to his hut, annoyed him by noisy hammering and he shouted out, ‘If only you knew who I am you would not dare to aggravate me in this way!’

  In October 1858, Kuzmich moved back to the outskirts of Tomsk where a merchant called Khromov offered to build him yet another hut on his property. The starets accepted and became friends with the merchant’s family, particularly with his young daughter Anna, with whom he had long conversations.

  Anna recorded in her diary an incident which greatly puzzled her at the time. The starets was living with them while his hut was being built and one evening, as the family were sitting round the dining-room table, Anna was reading aloud from a book that had just been published on the reign of Alexander I. She had just quoted: ‘Emperor Alexander turned to Napoleon and said to him . . .’ when a furious voice from the next room called out, ‘I never said that!’ The family looked at each other in amazement, realizing who it was who spoke.

  Kuzmich ended his days in the hut built for him by Simeon Khromov. As he grew weaker the merchant asked him who he really was. The reply was, as ever, enigmatic. ‘Here lies my secret’, he whispered, pointing to his heart.

  These were the last words he spoke before, just a few hours later, he died, leaving the mystery of his true identity forever unexplained.

  But if Kuzmich really was Tsar Alexander, how was another body placed in the coffin, without anyone – other than Wylie and possibly one or more of the other doctors who attended him – knowing what was taking place?

  A picture of him on his deathbed, painted in 1827, shows several black-coated figures standing in the room while Elizabeth sits by his bed. The Russian artist Kulakov, however, two years after Alexander’s death, must have relied on hearsay as to the actual number of persons in the room. More factually, the English Doctor Lee, who was present, left a detailed description of the tsar’s death. If the legend is true, Lee’s account must be an invention and Elizabeth, together with Wylie, must have been party to the deception that then took place.

  Certainly the embalmers at Taganrog were inefficient, but if another body, already in a state of decay, was secretly smuggled into the coffin, Alexander’s closest attendants, including his wife, must have been involved in a conspiracy to allow him to escape.

  It has been suggested that Elizabeth’s long sojourn at Taganrog had sinister implications, but the official explanation that her weak heart and well-known infirmity precluded the long journey back to St Petersburg was verified by her death on the way north.

  Surmising that Alexander did survive, the next obvious question is how was he spirited, unseen, from the house at Taganrog? Is it indeed possible that, as has been suggested, he was somehow transferred, presumably disguised and under cover of darkness, from the house to Lord Cathcart’s private yacht?

  William Shaw, 1st Earl Cathcart, as British ambassador to St Petersburg had been with Alexander all through the war with France. Travelling together, in close company, they had become firm friends. It may have been nothing more than coincidence but during Alexander’s visit to Taganrog, Cathcart’s yacht was seen lying in the harbour flying a British flag. This was quite odd, the little town on the Sea of Azov being far from a fashionable resort. What is more extraordinary, however, is that the yacht raised anchor and left the harbour on the very day that Alexander allegedly died.

  Should there be any truth in the theory that the tsar was thus secretly removed by sea, the next question that arises is what happened to him during the eleven years before, as the starets, he appeared in Siberia in 1836. One explanation that has been put forward is that he lived as a monk in a monastery somewhere in the Holy Land during those missing years.

  Finally the intriguing question remains as to who Feodor Kuzmich really was, if not Tsar Alexander as people finally took him to be?

  One possibility, suggested by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, is that this man, so obviously well educated and knowledgeable about events at the court of St Petersburg and of incidents in the Romanov family life, was Simeon, the illegitimate son of Tsar Paul and a mistress of his called Sophia Chertorzhskaya.93

  This would certainly explain the physical resemblance to Alexander, Simeon being his half-brother. Simeon, however, having been educated in St Petersburg, had then gone to England where he had joined the Royal Navy and served on HMS Vanguard. Supposedly he died of fever or else was drowned in the Baltic, but neither version is verified and the grand duke failed to find any official record of his death.

  Alternatively, it has been suggested that Kuzmich was a man of noble birth, possibly Nikolai Andreyevsky, a cavalry officer, who became a chamberlain in the imperial court. Otherwise several men of similar standing could conceivably have impersonated Alexander among the gullible people of a remote part of Russia.94

  Feodor Kuzmich died in 1864 by which time, were he really Alexander, he would have been eighty-five. This is another reason why, at a time when the average life expectancy was shorter than that of today, it is unlikely that they were one and the same. Two years later, however, speculation over the tsar’s death was further intensified when, on two separate occasions, his tomb was opened and found to be empty inside.

  It is feasible that the tsar’s body was removed by his nephew, Alexander II, and buried secretly in the graveyard of the Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg. If so he may have honoured the known wishes of his uncle, who had hated the thought of burial in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul, beside the father he felt he had murdered. Should this have happened Alexander must now lie beside the warrior prince whose exploits, during his lifetime, he had greatly revered.

  The enigmatic figure of Sir James Wylie, Tsar Alexander’s personal doctor, the one man who knew for certain of the manner of his death, was among those who mourned at his funeral in March 1826. Distinguished by his height, he stood, black-garbed, with bowed head, as the coffin containing the body of the man he had known, served and loved, was placed beside that of his father in the monastery of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul on that day in March 1826.

  What secret was Wylie hiding? For the lack of further evidence no one now will ever know. At the time his sorrow was evident, compounded, so the watchers believed, by his known failure to have forced the tsar to agree to the treatment which may conceivably have saved his life. Secretive as ever, Wylie imparted his knowledge to no one. Turning away from the grave, he left the church a sad and isolated man.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  City
of Secret Sedition

  It is from Doctor Robert Lee’s diary that the impression arises of the state of political tension in Russia following the Decembrist Rising of December 1825. People lived constantly in fear, afraid that even their most private conversations would be overheard and taken as reason for arrest.

  Lee also gives vivid descriptions of the country itself at that time. Leaving Taganrog on 10 January 1826 (the day after the funeral procession had set off for St Petersburg), he travelled with Count Vorontsov to Odessa through the worst of the Russian winter. The temperature frequently fell to below 168 Fahrenheit and the wind howled with the full force of a hurricane from Siberia over the vast plains down to the south of the Ukraine.

  So intense was the cold that Lee had kept himself occupied in Taganrog by carrying out an anatomical examination of the victims of hypothermia brought in from the steppes to the town. Reaching Odessa he found the general consensus to be that the nation had been saved from revolution by the courage and decision of Emperor Nicholas on the fateful day of 14 December.

  Lee was deeply distressed, however, to find that some of the greatest friends he had made during his time in Russia had been proved to be involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the emperor and the government. Foremost among these was General Michael Orloff, a hero of the war against France. Lee had been his guest in his house in Kiev as recently as the previous June. Orloff’s wife was both beautiful and intelligent and their household a particularly happy one.

  The general, a most perfect host, had taken him on a tour of places of interest, including the catacombs, dug out of the rock, which contained the bodies of more than 100 bishops, saints and historians. However, in private he had confessed to his loathing of the treatment of slaves and of the corrupt state of the government. Nonetheless, absorbed as he was in the study of political economy and sciences, he had given no hint of being in any way involved in a plot to raise a rebellion, let alone to destroy the royal family.

  Now charged with treason, this intellectual, civilized man, for whom Lee had such respect and affection, was incarcerated in the dungeon of the fortress in St Petersburg, renowned, as Lee knew, for the dreadful acts of bestial cruelty which took place within its walls.

  Another prisoner, the Polish Count Olizar, so recently a guest of Count Vorontsov in the Crimea and known to be in very poor health, was fortunately soon liberated. Not so Prince Serge Volkonsky, who was held without trial, had his sword broken over his head, and, stripped of his rank and honours, was banished to the wilds of Siberia reduced to the rank of a slave.

  Due to the unrest in Russia following Alexander’s death, Count Vorontsov found it necessary to travel to St Petersburg despite the still freezing weather of the early spring. Together with his doctor he set off from Odessa to begin the long journey from the south to the north on 15 March. Travelling on, at first over the steppes and then through vast areas of forest, they finally reached the capital after nearly four weeks, on 11 April.

  Lee, describing how they entered the city about midday, wrote:

  I was struck with astonishment at the grandeur of the quays, palaces, public buildings and the bridges of granite over the canals . . . Streets paved, the greatest cleanliness, and crowds of people moving about in every direction. I could not help contrasting this with the miserable villages and people I had left behind in White Russia.

  After dinner I went with Colonel A. Rajewsky to take a sail on the Neva. He told me that 250 persons were implicated in the conspiracy . . . We sailed under the Bridge of St Isaac to the Bourse, and from the point on which it stands saw at one view the fortress with all the buildings above it, and on the right the line of palaces and houses upon the quay. The sun was just setting and its rays were beautifully reflected from the broad stream of the Neva, and from the windows of the palaces along its shore.

  Soon Colonel Rajewsky was to confide in Lee the details of what had been intended by those involved in the intrigue to overthrow the regime. A constitutional government was to be established along the lines of that in America. The serfs were to be freed; the imperial family destroyed. Lee went with the colonel to visit his sister, the lovely Princess Volkonsky, and found her, as he put it, ‘overwhelmed with grief’. She had no idea what would happen to her husband, whether his life would even be spared.

  On 28 April, Mr Landers, brother-in-law of the British Consul in Odessa, arrived in St Petersburg. He brought the news that it was now thought to be inevitable that Russia and Turkey would soon be at war once again.

  The crisis had been initiated by Tsar Nicholas demanding the ratification of the Treaty of Bucharest, which had been signed by old General Kutuzov and ratified by Alexander on 28 May 1812, the day before Napoleon invaded Russia. The agreement had ended the conflict between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, which had lasted for six years since 1806. Under its terms the Prut River had become the border between the two empires, thus leaving Bessarabia under Russian rule. Russia had also gained the valuable trading rights on the Danube. The Turks, naturally resentful, now wished to reassert their claims.

  Troops were being marshalled and the Russian navy under Admiral Greig was preparing for action at sea. Sir James Wylie, head of the army medical department, was ordered to prepare for war. Then suddenly, and surprisingly, the Turkish government, initially so hostile, agreed to the new tsar’s terms.

  Doctor Lee, who saw Wylie at this moment, claimed he was visibly disappointed. This surprising remark, in view of Wylie’s known hatred of the inevitable carnage of war, leads one to believe that, relieved as he must have been that further wide-scale slaughter had been avoided, he was frustrated by the anti-climax of the peace, which had rendered all his preparations useless after weeks of pressurized activity, exhausting to a man of his age.

  Lee, in fact, went to the Artillery Hospital and found the wards ‘in excellent order’. He was told that the term ‘cardiopalmus’, invented by Wylie to describe palpitations, was now applied to all the diseases of the heart and great blood vessels ‘which I was told are extremely common in the officers and soldiers of the Russian army’.95

  Wylie had recently published in Russian his Practical Remarks on the Plague, which appeared in print at the same time as his translation from the English of James Johnson’s influential book on The Influence of Tropical Climate on European Constitutions.

  On 3 May Lee dined with a wealthy English merchant. Among the guests was a Mrs P (presumably an English woman), who had known Tsar Alexander and been a close friend of Elizabeth’s. She told him that the empress had left Taganrog and had managed the first part of the journey tolerably well. There was some anxiety about her health, however, for her feet were swelling and it was feared she had water on the lungs, which appeared to be hereditary as several of her family had died ‘of water on the chest’.

  Elizabeth had, thankfully, escaped the funeral service and everything that it involved. Too ill to travel with the funeral cortège in January, she had stayed at Taganrog until the snow melted on the steppes to the north. Then she had begun the journey, with her own physician Doctor Stoffregen and her ladies-in-waiting in attendance. Travelling in stages of only fifty miles a day, she was nonetheless exhausted and painfully breathless. On the evening of 15 May she stopped at Belev where, early the next morning, her maid found her dead in bed.

  Elizabeth’s funeral took place on 14 June 1826. Rumours were circulating that anonymous letters had been sent to Tsar Nicholas, warning him of a probable attempt at assassination. Subsequently, Nicholas and his Etat-Major reviewed the troops at a gallop, saluting each regiment as he passed before the funeral began.

  The great concourse of people who came to pay their last respects included many tradespeople, draped in black and carrying black flags, and girls belonging to the different schools which Elizabeth had patronized. Lancers and a long company of priests walked in the procession, which followed the funeral carriage drawn by eight grey horses. At the head, the new emperor and empress and generals and of
ficers preceded a long line of cavalry and horse artillery. There was no music, only the sombre crash of guns fired every minute from the fortress of St Peter and St Paul.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Invasion and Rebellion

  Conspicuous among those attending the funeral was a man who stood almost a head taller than most of the surrounding crowd. Although now nearly sixty, Sir James Wylie was still a distinguished figure, his back erect, his hair turning grey. No one present regretted Elizabeth’s passing more than he. His thoughts must have rested on the time when, as a young man of thirty, he had first entered the royal household when Elizabeth, the fair-haired princess from Baden, with the beauty of a fragile flower, had been only twenty-four.

  How well he remembered his pity for her as he had seen her humiliated by Alexander’s parents, dominated by his imperious mother and terrorized by his father’s sarcasm and fits of uncontrollable rage. He had witnessed her sadness at the deaths of their two little daughters, one only a baby, the other just a year old. Wylie had watched them both suffer and witnessed, to his sorrow, how Alexander had found solace with his mistress while Elizabeth retired, almost to obscurity. Afterwards, it had seemed miraculously, he had seen Alexander turn to Elizabeth, inspired by her faith in religion, after the disasters of Borodino and the fall of Moscow had sent him almost insane.

  As witness to their married life together, Wylie knew, as did few others, that Alexander, unfaithful as he had been, had really loved only Elizabeth, the frail and near ethereal beauty chosen for him by his grandmother when he was only fifteen. He also knew that Elizabeth, admired as she had been by others, including Prince Adam Czartoryski, her husband’s friend and confidant, had never loved anyone but Alexander, without whom the world had no pleasure for her. Crowding out times of unhappiness was the image of those halcyon days at Taganrog before the onset of his fatal disease. Alexander’s death had clouded her existence. He alone had been her sun.