By Way of Epilogue
The Feodor Kuzmich Mystery
In the autumn of 1836, the government police of Perm in the Urals arrested a man traveling on horseback who said he was called Feodor Kuzmich. Aged about 60, tall in height and large in shoulder, with blue eyes, deaf in one ear, educated and expressing himself with great ease, the man, who did not carry a domestic passport, refused to say more; he was condemned to 20 strokes of the whip and several months in prison. His punishment completed, still silent about his past, Kuzmich was sent to Tomsk to work in a state distillery. He stayed there five years, living in poverty among simple folk, but he was very active and interested in others: he delivered advice on hygiene, health, and agriculture to the peasantry, taught their children Holy Scripture, the elementary rules of spelling and arithmetic, history and geography. This strange man—he spoke French and seemed to know the Russian court and its customs—whose ascetic life was given to charity, soon was the subject of rumors. Already, he was spoken of as a nobleman fleeing his past.
Tired of the rumors, the starets1 took up his peregrinations in 1842 across Siberia without really settling down anywhere. In 1858 he was welcomed by a merchant from Tomsk, Semyon Khromov, who lodged him in a small, isolated house away from town, where he lived permanently as a hermit. Dying in 1864, the old man was buried in the cemetery of the Tomsk monastery. On the tomb, which quickly became a place of pilgrimage, Khromov had inscribed, “Here lies the great hermit blessed by God,2 Feodor Kuzmich, who died on January 20, 1864.”3
The choice of the expression “blessed by God” is significant because it refers to the title with which the senate had honored Alexander I; in fact, after the death of Kuzmich, the rumor spread in Siberia and tongues wagged: Kuzmich and Alexander I were one and the same. Convinced of this, Khromov wrote to Alexander II in 1866, hoping to meet him to give him notes and documents that had belonged to Kuzmich, but he got no answer.4 He persisted and at the start of the reign of Alexander III, in the summer of 1881, he went to St. Petersburg, where he met the procurer of the Holy Synod, Constantine Pobedonostsev,5 to explain the affair with notes he had clumsily drawn up and to ask him to pass on the to the new emperor the dead man’s personal effects, including several icons and a portrait of the starets, which Alexander III did keep on his desk. Later—but written sources are lacking, and we are reduced to unverifiable oral testimony—Alexander III may have had the tomb of Alexander I in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersburg opened up, and Count Vorontsov-Dachkov, in charge of the operation, is said to have found that the tomb was empty.6
•••
At the end of the nineteenth century, educated elites in turn appropriated the mystery. Convinced that Kuzmich and Alexander were mixed up with each other, Tolstoy devoted a work of fiction to the affair, titled Memoirs of the starets Feodor Kuzmich, who died on 20 January 1864 in Siberia, near Tomsk, in the hamlet of the Merchant Khromov. In the guise of writing Kuzmich’s memoirs, Tolstoy imagines how the tsar organized a fake funeral after planning his flight. At the same time, in 1897–1898, in his enormous, four-volume biography of Emperor Alexander I, Shilder in turn gives credit to the idea that the emperor voluntarily disappeared, which was easier to perform in Taganrog, far from court, than in St. Petersburg. He stresses that at Kuzmich’s death there were found in his cell several icons, including one dedicated to the Virgin that had under the protective glass the letter “A” with a crown over it.7 Shilder’s view was shared by several archivists of St. Petersburg8 and more privately by some members of the imperial family, including Tsarevich Nicholas (the future Nicholas II), who went to the hermit’s grave in 1891.9 But Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich (the biographer) contradicted these assertions at the end of the tsarist period; in a little book published in 1912, the official historian categorically denied Shilder’s idea. For him, the initial under the icon’s glass in no way proved that Kuzmich and Alexander I were the same person; moreover, the handwriting of the two men clearly differed from one another. Finally, to accept the thesis of a voluntary disappearance would amount to accepting that either the empress, when she wrote in her diary of the “illness” and agony of her husband, was participating in an enormous charade—which runs counter to her character—or that she was not taken into the confidence of the others. But such treachery—given the renewed affections between the couple and the empress’s advancing tuberculosis—seems totally implausible.10 However, his book did not put an end to the debate, and the Grand Duke himself, shortly before being executed by the Bolsheviks, is said to have seen new documents and to have changed his mind.11
The polemic resumed immediately before World War I. In a text published in St. Petersburg in 1913 and reprinted in Paris in 1929,12 Prince Bariatinsky made himself the fervent advocate of the idea of Alexander I’s having deliberately disappeared and staging his “death” in a Machiavellian fashion; the prince drew rigorously and convincingly on gross inconsistencies in the stories told by the various witnesses present in Taganrog.
After the victory of the Bolsheviks and the advent of the Communist regime, the Soviet authorities (in 1921) may have examined the remains of the Russian sovereigns buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress—and found, too, that Alexander I’s tomb was empty.13 But this assertion, discreetly circulating among archivists and historians at the very time that Soviet biographers were officially denigrating the “legend” of Feodor Kuzmich as a baseless story, could not be supported by written sources. And, unfortunately, the files referring to the opening of Alexander’s grave have remained missing from the archives to the present day.
The “Kuzmich mystery” has given rise to interpretations that vary according to the political and cultural leanings of the biographers: while Soviet historians were resolute partisans of the tsar’s natural death, in the West the thesis of a deliberate disappearance was supported, particularly in works by emigrant Russians. Today, in a spectacular turnaround, academic works recently published in Russia call the latter idea “very probable,”14 if not “certain.”15
•••
If, at the end of this epilogue, I am reluctant to take a definitive position, I would like to note some important points. Of course, Russian history over the centuries has been full of myths that feature false tsars, or else imposters, and so the early death of Alexander (at age 47), out of sight, was likely to feed the most implausible rumors. In this legend there might be the more or less conscious desire to refuse this “abnormal” death, given Alexander’s age. But this argument seems to be hard to believe: in 1825, the emperor had become extremely unpopular, due to the regimentation of people in the military colonies. Why would the little people of Siberia have wanted, years after the events, to “prolong” the tsar’s life by this fiction, when the final years of his reign had brought them only suffering and desolation? The other argument advanced by the proponents of a natural death in Taganrog relates to the difficulty of conducting the affair of a disappearance to the end: for “rationalist” historians it was perhaps easy for the tsar to simulate illness, but to find a substitute cadaver and pass it off as the body of the deceased would imply complicity among those closest to the emperor, and sooner or later the secret would have come out. Finally, the delayed “reappearance” of the emperor also seems suspect. How could the tsar have lived for 11 years incognito in his own empire and resurface only in 1836? Where was he during those 11 “lost” years? And if the most plausible hypothesis is that the emperor was living in a monastery during this period, then how could word not have filtered out? In this context should we simply accept that Kuzmich, though strongly resembling Alexander and ending up strongly identifying with him, was not really the emperor?
These arguments confront equally plausible ones from the partisans of a voluntary disappearance. Foremost among these arguments are Alexander’s weariness and oft-expressed desire to abdicate and the growing urgency of doing so. In the absence of any constitutional reform, the power he had inherited remained a sacred and absolu
te power from which only death—or the staging of this death—might deliver him. In the autumn of 1825, more and more tired of power, Alexander had already mentally left his empire, relying entirely on Arakcheev; the defection of Arakcheev after the personal tragedy he had suffered might have convinced the tsar to accelerate his plan of a disguised renunciation of the throne in order to devote himself to an anonymous life of prayer, to which he had long aspired. Finally, and most especially, how can we understand that the illness and death throes—if that is what they were—that involved the fate of the most important person in the empire (sacred, in principle) could give rise to so many contradictory stories among those closest to him, members of his family, friends, and doctors?16 For—and this makes the affair troubling—these accounts do not correspond to one another at all. In the crucial week from the eleventh to the nineteenth of November (O.S.), versions differ: Pyotr Volkonsky, the emperor’s aide-de-camp and friend, and the personal doctor Wylie disagree on the chronological description of the illness; as for the diary meticulously kept by Elizabeth since her arrival in Taganrog, it suddenly ends on the eleventh (O.S.). Was it destroyed, or did the empress prefer to keep silent? Both hypotheses remain. As regards the last hours of the tsar’s life, the two doctors, Tarasov and Wylie, give completely contradictory accounts. While Tarasov writes that the emperor spent “a calm night,” Wylie describes “a very agitated night,” with the sovereign “getting worse and worse.” Should we see these fluctuations as the result of “diaries” written after the fact, in a clumsy attempt to give an account of an event that did not take place? The autopsy results are themselves subject to caution: one document mentions cerebral lesions linked to syphilis—from which the tsar never suffered! And while in 1824 Alexander had suffered an erysipelas in his left leg, recorded in the medical register kept by Wylie, it was on the cadaver’s right leg that the scars of an old wound were found! Finally, while the record of the autopsy was supposedly signed by nine doctors in the presence of General Chernyshev, Tarasov, who supposedly wrote it and whose name is at the bottom of the document, asserted in his memoirs that he had never signed it. Nor do the contradictions end there. For Tarasov, the work of embalming the body was perfectly executed; for Schonig, the body quickly became black, and many of the few who approached it found it unrecognizable. Finally, on the pretext that the sickness had disfigured the sovereign, during the funeral that took place on March 26 (O.S.), 1826, in St. Petersburg, the coffin, laid in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, was hidden from view, contrary to the Orthodox rite that required that the deceased be left in an open bier. Nobody was allowed to see the face of the emperor.
•••
From these elements, the historian cannot draw any absolute conclusion—unless one could open the sovereign’s tomb. But in either case—whether Alexander may have lived the life of a prayerful ascetic in Siberia in the guise of the starets Feodor Kuzmich, which finally allowed him to expiate the original parricide, or whether he died in Taganrog, far from the capital and the court, whether his death was simulated or natural—after December 1, 1825, whether rendered to anonymity or to the soil of his fathers, Alexander I no longer belongs to Russian history.
Notes to Introduction
1. “Our Angel is in Heaven,” wrote Elizabeth to announce Alexander’s death to her mother, in Taganrod on November 19, 1825.
2. Comtesse de Choiseul-Gouffier, Mémoires historiques, 15.
3. Talma was a famous French actor.
4. Napoleon to Caulaincourt.
5. For example, his mother and his beloved sister Catherine.
6. Quoted by K. Waliszewski in La Russie, 1: 25.
7. Ibid., I: 23.
8. Caulaincourt to French Foreign Minister, September 19, 1810, in Romanov, Relations diplomatiques, 5: 139.
9. The image is poet Viazemsky’s.
10. See, in particular, Troubetskoy, Imperial Legend.
11. See Pypin, Obshhestvennoe dvizhenie.
12. The same idea is present in N. K. Shilder’s analysis.
13. Waliszewski, La Russie, passim.
14. Platonov, Polnyj kurs.
15. Troyat, Alexandre Ier.
16. Paléologue, Alexandre Ier.
17. Grunwald, Alexandre Ier.
18. Arkhanguelski, Alexandre Ier.
19. Olivier, Alexandre Ier.
20. Rain, Un tsar idéologue.
21. Klimenko, Tsar Alexander I.
22. McConnell, Tsar Alexander I.
23. Fedorov, V., in Emperors and Empresses, 216.
24. Sakharov, Aleksandr I.
25. See, on a methodological level, Dosse, Le pari biographique.
26. This collection (fd n.679) is located in Moscow, at the GARF (Governmental Archives of the Russian Federation). But the Russian archives about Alexander’s reign are partial because Nicholas I burned many valuable documents when he came into power. Among these lost documents were parts of the diaries of Maria Feodorovna and Elizabeth.
27. I consulted the Jesuit archives located in Rome (Italy) and in Vanves (France).
28. Only a part of this correspondence has been published. Many letters written by Alexander I, in French or in Russian and unpublished so far, are located in Moscow, either in the RGADA or in the GARF, where the personal archives of the tsar are preserved.
29. Napoleon to Las Cases, in Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, March 10–12, 1816.
Notes to Prologue
1. Marquis de Sanglin, “Mémoires,” Russkaja Starina, 38 (1883): 3.
2. A. Czartoryski, Mémoires, 1: 223.
3. Ibid., 1: 261.
4. See Suvorin Careubijstvo.
5. Comte de Langeron, Mémoire sur la mort de Paul Ier, manuscript with no page numbers. This manuscript is located in the Richelieu collection, Mémoires et Documents, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, ref MS 99. It was written in 1826, but Langeron mentions in the introduction that he gathered testimonies much earlier: Pahlen’s testimony in 1804, Bennigsen’s and Constantine’s a bit later.
6. Langeron, Mémoire. Italics are mine.
7. Whitworth to Panin, manuscript letter, May 26 (June 7), 1800. The document is located in the Kent Archives Office (U 269 O 197/7). Quoted by Kenney in “Lord Whitworth,” 214–15.
8. Ibid., 216–17.
9. Ibid.
10. Brian-Chaninov, Alexandre Ier, 20–21.
11. Meaning the officers of the Semenovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments.
12. Pahlen’s testimony, quoted in Langeron, Mémoire.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. This thesis is defended by Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich in his biography of Tsar Alexander: Le tsar Alexandre Ier, 18. This biography was published twice: in two volumes in French and in Russian (with illustrations) in 1912 in St. Petersburg (Romanov, Imperator Aleksandr I); in one volume (with no illustrations) in 1931 in Paris after the Grand Duke’s death (Romanov, Le Tsar Alexandre Ier). I will mostly refer to the latter edition.
17. This is the analysis of Waliszewski, La Russie, 1: 4.
18. Elizabeth to her mother, March 13 (25), 1801. Quoted by Romanov in Imperatrica Elisaveta Alekseevna, 271.
19. Quoted in Paléologue, Alexandre Ier, 1.
20. This image is Herzen’s.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. Catherine II, Sbornik, letter n.46. The birthdate is by the old calendar (hereafter O.S.).
2. See Heller, Histoire de la Russie, 545–46.
3. Raskol in Russsian. The raskol took place in the seventeenth century when Patriarch Nikon decided to come back to the primitive texts of the Church, which required believers to change their rituals. But a large part of these believers rejected this return to the old liturgy. Called “raskolniki,” that is, “schismatics,” they had to face prosecutions, and many of them chose to perish rather than renounce their convictions.
4. Meaning peasants who did not belong to noblemen.
5. Elizabeth was Peter�
��s daughter, and her reign lasted from 1741 to 1761. See Liechtenhan, Elisabeth Ière.
6. Indeed, Peter was infertile.
7. See Fedorov, in Emperors and Empresses, 181–82.
8. Golovkine, La cour et le règne, 100.
9. Ibid., 104.
10. He was expelled from Russia in 1797, one year after Paul came to power, and began to write his memoirs, the first volume of which was published in 1800.
11. Masson, Mémoires secrets, 179–181.
12. Fedorov, in Emperors and Empresses, 183.
13. Ragsdale, Tsar Paul, 8–9.
14. Sakharov, Aleksandr I, 27–28.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. The collection n.728, entitled “Kollekcija dokumentov rukopisnogo otdelenija biblioteki Zimnego Dvorca,” which is located in the GARF, presents a very fine corpus of letters exchanged by Alexander and his mother during the years 1790–1794 and 1797–1800.
Alexander I- the Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon Page 51
