The Mysterious Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov

by Carl Douglass

  His army was in shambles; hundreds of men were being slashed, stabbed, and trampled to death. The survivors turned the battle into a rout as they threw down their weapons and fled aimlessly for the trees. The Cossacks formed up into three columns and encircled the hysterical Tatars and rioters who were now falling to the ground and begging for mercy.

  Mullah Zhevakhov could do nothing but turn-about and to flee in the same craven cowardice that he had been cursing his army for displaying. His only thought now was to get out of this hellish place and to survive, by any means to survive.

  He shed his kaftan and his weapons and threw on a cloak he tore from a dead rioter. He was sure that the bloodthirsty Cossacks would not chase what had to be seen as nothing but one more poor nameless conscript running for his life.

  He was wrong. The young golden haired lordly rider reined up in front of the mullah and leaped from his horse. Three Cossacks reined up and leaped from their horses surrounding the mullah.

  “Do not kill him. Keep him alive!” shouted the boy over the din of the battle. “He is worth far more alive than dead!”

  The frenzy died down, and Vlad led his two sons to the mullah and trussed him up like a pig going to market. They procured a riderless mount and unceremoniously threw the grand mullah across the empty saddle. They secured his hands to his feet below the horse’s belly and rode off to the slaughter ground.

  Boris rode close behind the Cossacks, and they met a squad of marines and naval combat veterans.

  Captain of Marines Sergei Antonovich Karpov began herding the Tatar and rioter prisoners towards the center of the valley and signaled for his corporals to bring the enlisted men in towards the center with their sabers at the ready. Sergei Antonovich stepped to Prince Boris and offered to relieve him of responsibility for Mullah Zhevakhov. The alternative to Boris and his militia controlling the leader of the mutinous mob was to be found in the ever-shrinking central area of the valley.

  “No,” said Boris and proceeded to have a stare-down contest with the tough and battle hardened marine officer.

  Sergei Antonovich went ahead with his collection of prisoners for the educational exercise about to take place in the center of the valley as he had not heard Boris.

  Boris put his body between Mullah Zhevakhov and the enthusiastic marine.

  “No,” he repeated.

  The marine’s hand went to the grip of his sword and moved it a fraction out of its scabbard. His marines and Boris’s Cossacks were shocked by a lightening quick move by the prince. Before the marine could blink, he was facing a razor-sharp and still bloody cavalry saber wielded by an obviously earnest young aristocrat.

  “So, you who believe that you are the Son of Somebody, are about to interfere with me doing my duty. Step aside and live, Boy.”

  “No,” Boris said for the third time, and this time delicately rested his sword’s edge on the marine captain’s neck, just enough to produce a few drops of the man’s blood.

  The marine paled, now aware that he had made an unfortunate miscalculation of the courage and capability of the young man, and that he might just be the Son of Somebody. Even if he were to best the brash boy in a fight, he knew how the world worked in the imperial armed forces. It would not turn out well for him.

  He snarled and adopted a surly expression. He made a move to back away and pulled at his sword’s handle. That was a mistake that resulted in a slightly deeper red line being drawn on his throat, and considerably more bleeding. The next mistake on the part of the marines that day was that a young corporal unsheathed his saber and hurled himself at Boris. The result was that the young corporal was dead before he fell to the ground, and Boris’s sword edge had returned to the captain’s throat before the officer could complete his intended sentence.

  “No.”

  The now terrified marine officer quickly turned his eyes towards a group of four marine enlisted men in what he thought was an eye glance equivalent of verbalizing “no”. In a matter of seconds three Cossacks attacked the hapless young marines who had never before seen battle or a dead man. Before Boris or Captain Karpov could intervene to prevent the horror of an internecine conflict, all the marines were dead of sword thrusts except for one who was decapitated.

  Sergei Karpov leaned over and vomited. Boris had just enough composure left to scream in Ukranian Cossack, “СТОП”, which ended the fight. Apparently “stop!” was better understood than “Het!” [no].

  “Get the mullah back to the ship, then join me and the militia in the center of the valley before we become witness to a slaughter of defenseless men which will stain the honor of the imperial armed forces for generations,” Boris ordered Vlad.

  Young Boris was not aware that the slaughter of vanquished opponents was standard practice by imperial forces for time infinitum and in most cases by other less honorable military victors. For him, honor was crucial; and for that day, it was hailed as the motto of the empire and would become the only memorable aspect of the entire unfortunate incident.

  On a practical level, the rescued Tatars were imprisoned for a short time then sold as slaves to the Ukrainians; the highly chastened factory workers of the Kersh peninsula returned to work at longer hours and lower pay and were happy that that was as bad as it became. None of that became part of the chronicles of the Crimean Troubles as handled by the tzar’s forces over the decades.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A STEP AHEAD

  “Forget yourself and go to work.”

  —Bryant S. Hinckley to his son,

  future LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley

  National Archives of Australia, Victorian Archives Centre, 99 Shiel Street, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, June 11, 2013

  The two preceding weeks had been particularly fruitful for the Mormon missionaries working in the archives in Victoria, Australia. So much so that the state published a two-page article extoling the great work done by the church and its missionaries for the people of Australia and for succeeding generations. For the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the most positive outcome was that the anti-Mormon rhetoric rife in the country now came to fall on deaf ears; and the Church began to see fruits of its very costly program in the form of polite inquiries about the Church’s remarkable genealogical program which came to be recognized as a great free gift to all of the people of Australia. The equally costly volunteer missionary program began to see more genuine interest on the part of nonmembers, more convert baptisms, and greater assimilation of the LDS people into the regular life of Australia.

  For the missionaries toiling away in the basement of the archives center, several good things resulted. First, they were treated to a dinner with the Rotary Club and asked to speak about the good work they were doing for the country. Second, the missionaries and regular members of the church found themselves being invited into neighbors’ homes for lunches, dinners, and afternoon chats. A somewhat lonely and cloistered existence there in the basement began to expand out so that the missionaries could be what they really were–regular good people with a lot to give. Sister Smith and Sister Clyde were even invited to give a quilting demonstration and to start a class for younger Australian women who were beginning to take an interest in some nearly forgotten crafts and skills like quilting, macramé, and bread baking.

  The most important small victory was announced by Sister Durrell.

  “Elders and Sisters, Elder Durrell…”

  “Otherwise known as her husband, LaRen…” blurted out Elder Smith, the group’s self-appointed class clown.

  “Please, Elder Smith, you know about the rules on first names. It’s a mission rule, and so it is a sacred thing,” Sister Nichols—the generally accepted parliamentarian of the tight-knit little group—scolded. “I just don’t think you should joke about sacred things, that’s all.”

  “Oh, good grief…” Nephi Smith started to protest and was promptly shushed by his long-suffering wife.

  He rolled his eyes but saved his wife’s ten
der feelings as the group’s peace-maker—by keeping his lips zipped.

  “As I was starting to say, Elder Durrell…”

  “Oh, my goodness, Sister Durrell, go ahead and take credit you deserve,” Elder LaRen Durrell said insistently.

  She blushed and went on, “I have found a little something related to the mysterious Alexandra Yusupov who got some interest going among us a while back.”

  “Good. I’m hoping you have a usable piece of genealogical evidence, Sister Durrell,” said Sister Nichols.

  “Here, I have an authentic birth certificate from Balagansk, Far Eastern Russia, dated five April, 1861.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  SENIOR STAFF MILITARY SCHOOL

  “He needed the warmth of the sun to take away the chill of foreboding that grew in him.”

  —Francine Rivers, A Voice in the Wind

  Nikolai I General Staff Academy, Moscow, Imperial Russia, December 8, 1863

  Stabbs Captain Prince Boris Yusupov reported as ordered to the registrar of the General Staff Academy. His acceptance into the premier military academy in the empire came as no surprise since his father had learned of his heroics—at least the escapades that had grown wings of their own since they took place and became the stuff of near legend for an aspiring young imperial army officer. What Boris lacked in professional schooling, he more than made up for by his daring-do, the saga of his leadership, and, of course, by having his name become synonymous with honor insofar as it related to a Russian army officer. Without family influence, Boris’s commanding officer placed the young prince’s name on the list of honors for the past year. He was awarded the crosses of Saint Stanislaus and Saint Anne—second class, an unheard-of set of honors for one so young.

  It helped that his father had forgiven him for his dalliance with the peasant girl, even though Prince Nikolai was not ready for his scion to darken the Yusupov doors just yet. The richest man in the empire and the most influential–second only to the tzar himself–had once again approached Boris’s godfather, Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, sixth son of Alexander II, Tzar of all the Russias, a full general in his own right, and the commandant of the General Staff Academy. To no one’s surprise, Boris was given a warm reception by the Grand Duke and was accepted into the ultimately prestigious academy based on Grand Duke’s formal recommendation. Prince Nikolai’s vanity was thoroughly heightened by having a son who was the youngest man ever accepted to the academy—not yet seventeen—an obvious harbinger of an illustrious career, presumed Nikolai.

  Boris was allotted living space for himself and three servants, and each of his two apartment mates were given the same privileges. There were rules against having young women in his living quarters, but no prohibition against having a cook and a couple of scullery maids. For all of his worldly experience, Boris was rather shy around girls; so, his older and more world-wise roommate, Alexander Soloviev, found a handsome Nordic woman who could cook. The other roommate, Andrei Zhelyabov, went Alexander one better and brought in two teenage Slavic girls whose looks were such that none of the men cared overly much whether or not they were good at cooking or cleaning. The Yusupov quarters soon became the party center for the academy’s aristocratic students.

  Boris–despite his military experience and sophisticated manners–was still a seventeen-year-old boy and rather vulnerable to being manipulated or seduced into accepting ideologies that were popular but not appropriate for the conservative scion of one of the most conservative families in the empire. Alexander, Andrei, and Andrei’s girl-friend, Sophia Perovskaya, were falling under the spell of Mikhail Bakunin and his Land and Liberty reformers party. The group published literature demanding that the land in Russia held by the government and the church be granted back to the poor landless people. The group, their meetings, and their publications were secret; and Prince Boris’s aristocratic set would have been aghast if they had learned that the one-day-to-be head of the House of Yusupov was consorting with such rebels and near-traitors to the tzar.

  Perhaps that is why Boris found his roommates and their satellites so fascinating: they were against everything his father and mother and their imperial friends held holy. Their discussions were exciting, all the more because they were necessarily secret; and they were so iconoclastic. Had he put more thought into what was going on, Prince Boris would have realized that the icons which were being threatened were the very ones on whom Boris had to depend for his career, comforts, and the maintenance of his luxurious life style.

  Two months into his first year of studies at the academy, Boris was having difficulty plowing through the heavy tomes required for his additional studies course in the science of war. The course was of obvious importance because it was core to his chosen career but also because–if he passed the course with a satisfactory recommendation from the colonel who taught it–he was all but guaranteed a place on the general staff of the army and a generalship at a young age. He was now ambitious enough to believe that that was his destiny.

  Alexander sat on the large soft cushion chair with Ingrid Swenssdatter, the cook, cuddled on his lap reading Bakunin’s book, Statism and Anarchism.

  “Listen to this, Boris…Andrei…Sophia, this is what I mean when I say that Bakunin needs to be the next Russian leader—not, tzar, but real leader of the people.”

  He thumbed back through several pages until he found the passage he was looking for.

  “They, [referring to the Marxists, Alexander emphasized] maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to such rhetoric this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it. Freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.”

  It took Boris a few seconds to remove his mind from the science of war and over to the religion of radical politics—anarchism. He came to his senses as he realized that these people were not just eccentric thinkers, they were dedicated enemies to everything he held dear. What a foolish boy he had been. He was in a dilemma, but he knew what he had to do, however difficult.

  “Alexander, I presume you fully realize that we are sitting in an apartment set aside by the tzar and his government in order for us to become officers his imperial army. It is one thing to have an interest in what is going on in the country, but it is quite another to be flirting with anarchy and possible insurrection. We will have to choose whether to fight for or against the tzar, and I certainly choose the tzar and the great Russian imperial government.”

  “While the tides of history are turning against dictators all over the world? Wake up, Boris. This is the real world, the new world. We have a chance to rid ourselves and the world of such dictators, oligarchs, and despots. Revolution is in the wind. Change is inevitable. However dangerous, we must be part of the change. Surely you can see that. You can’t be entirely blinded by those relics of the past in your family and their corrupt governmental connections.”

  Alexander was red in the face, angry, and passionate. There was no potential for compromise in this young ideologue. Why hadn’t Boris seen that before?

  “You speak sedition, mutiny, and anarchy. I cannot be associated with you any longer. Leave these quarters. Take all your belongings and find a new place to live. Take your friends while you’re at it. That includes you, Andrei and Sophia. Do not mention my name in any of your conversations since you know that I will never agree with you!”

  Boris worked to control his temper and his passion. All he knew for sure was that he had get himself away from this anarchistic and seditious pack. They would ruin him. That much he was as certain about as the existence of heaven and hell. The passage from Revelations 21:1-27, flashed into his mind: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more..” He actually trembled at the thought of
how dangerous his foolish boyish antics had been.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PROOF

  And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things:

  therefore, if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.

  —Book of Mormon, Book of Alma 32:21

  Faith is an island in the setting sun, but proof is the bottom line for everyone.

  —Paul Simon

  National Archives of Australia, Victorian Archives Centre, 99 Shiel Street, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, September 30, 2013

  The day had been one of the most productive any of the missionaries could recall. Maybe it was because the days were becoming a bit cooler. Maybe it was because this was Friday; and there was a long weekend full of senior missionary fun—two dinners, one with the mission president and his wife, and one at the home of the Durrells–a pot luck as usual. And, they had an excursion planned into the outback led by an old time Aussie bogan. He was eighty-five, had a beard down to his belt buckle, and wore clothes with holes in them—“the raggedy man who worked for pa, the raggedyist man you ever saw”–Elder Tanner said about him.

  Elder Smith burst into the photography section with his usual hyperbolic grand entrance, and said in his basso profundo pseudo-Mussolini voice, “I have found the first and grandest piece of evidence. Congratulate me everyone,” he guffawed.