“Why do you keep talking about two?”
“Read carefully the Yurovsky Note you published. Yurovsky wrote that three of the daughters were wearing ‘diamond corsets.’ But what about the fourth? Why wasn’t the fourth?” He laughed. “There weren’t enough? Or the story with Alexei? After all, they tried to shoot him at two paces. And couldn’t. It’s unlikely even a very nervous Chekist like Nikulin could fail to hit him at two paces. That meant Alexei was wearing a ‘diamond shield’—and it saved him. He was ‘armored’ as well. That was the reason for his ‘strange vitality.’ Yurovsky didn’t write anything about this, though. Why? Because Alexei was not undressed! If they had undressed him, they would probably have found Rasputin’s amulet on him, too! The tsaritsa could not have left her son without an amulet of his savior. But Yurovsky wrote only about amulets on the tsar’s daughters. That means they didn’t undress him for sure. Why? Maybe they feared God? Funny, eh? Then why?
“Here’s your answer—it’s at the end of Yurovsky’s Note. They only burned two of them: Alexei and someone of the female sex. Why two? Why not burn the rest? Or: if they didn’t burn the rest, then why did they burn the two? Why didn’t they burn Nicholas? After all, wasn’t he much more important?” He laughed. “This is why: they were missing two corpses: a boy and a young woman. They were also missing the diamonds on them. That’s why Yurovsky thought of writing that they’d burned two of them—the boy and a female. So, who was that female? Demidova, as Yurovsky writes? Couldn’t they have gotten them mixed up in the insanity of that night? Perhaps that rescued woman was not Demidova, and the stars that the woman who later called herself Anastasia saw when she woke up in the cart were the stars of that impossible night.
Anastasia? In any event, after Anastasia’s appearance in Berlin, Ermakov’s friend and drinking companion, the Chekist Grigory Sukhorukov, who also participated in the burial, compiled some extremely noteworthy affidavits, which are now kept in the local Party archive. The affidavits repeat the version about burning two bodies, but these actually specify a new female name: Alexei and … Anastasia! Not Demidova, as Yurovsky asserted, but Anastasia. Realizing that some explanation would have to be provided for why they burned only those two, Sukhorukov invented a very clumsy explanation: “So no one would guess from the number of remaining corpses that this was the tsar’s family”!
Two may have been saved, then. And Lyukhanov, of course, saw two of them being taken off the truck. And he hung back, bickering with the watchwoman, so there would be time to remove them. After all, he had a younger son named Alexei, too. The son said that Lyukhanov liked to say: ‘God can do anything.’ Evidently, though, he later told his wife everything. He kept silent for a long time, but he couldn’t hold back—he told her. Commandant Avdeyev’s sister could not understand him, though! She was a person of ideas. Like Yurovsky, like all of them. The most she could do was not inform on the father of her four children. But live with him—that she couldn’t do. So he lost his ideological Avgusta. However, the suffering in her dying hour evidently pried something half-open for her. And she forgave him.”
We were silent for a while.
I said: “But in the White Guard investigation, someone told a story from one of Ermakov’s men that he saw Alexei’s body at the mine.”
“Exactly: someone told a story from someone else….”
“By the way, Yurovsky was alarmed too; evidently the rumors about Anastasia moved him to take action as well. In 1920, when this mysterious, ‘miraculously saved’ woman appeared in Berlin, he gave the historian Pokrovsky his Note, the idea behind which was ‘They all died.’”
“Can it really be that despite all your clearly major opportunities, you never attempted to open the grave? After all, you knew where it was, didn’t you?”
He chuckled, then said, “Whether I tried to or not—it’s a horrible place, believe me. How that grave draws you all! In 1928 Mayakovsky came to Sverdlovsk and immediately wanted to see the grave of the tsar and his family. The chairman of the Ural Soviet at the time was a certain Paramonov. Later, of course, he was repressed, but—a rare case—not executed. After his rehabilitation Paramonov came back alive. He used to tell me how they took Mayakovsky to the place ‘where the family’s bodies were burned’—which was how Paramonov referred to the ‘grave.’ This was his favorite story—how he searched at the ‘burning place’ for ‘notches left in a birch.’ That day, when he took Mayakovsky, there was a hard frost and the trees were hoary, and he searched for a long time but didn’t find any notch.
As for the notches in the birches and Paramonov, all of it was confirmed later in a letter I received.
From a letter of literary scholar Kirill Sherstok in Frunze:
“When I was working on my thesis about Mayakovsky, Paramonov told me how Mayakovsky visited him twice and how they went to the last Russian emperor’s final refuge.… Paramonov said that in the poem ‘The Emperor’—about the tsar’s grave—Mayakovsky made a mistake, asserting that the emperor had been buried ‘under a cedar.’ He was buried between three birches. I asked, ‘And where is this place?’ He answered that there were two men left who knew it: he, Paramonov, and one more man, whom he did not name. I recalled Paramonov saying, ‘No one must know this,’ and adding, ‘so that there are no pilgrimages.’”
As he was leaving, my guest said: “This whole story is like a polemic with Dostoevsky. Starting with the question to Alyosha Karamazov: ‘If to erect the edifice of a happy mankind it were necessary to torture just one small child, would you agree to base this edifice on his tear?’ One Alyosha was asked this question and with the help of another slain Alyosha [Alexei] they answered.” He fell silent. “One thing, though, is clear: he will come back to us.”
I asked him to repeat that.
“I mean the sovereign emperor. It’s a banal story, though. Killing the family, those idiots preempted his return. ‘In my end is my beginning’—those words were once embroidered by his relative Mary Stuart. By the way, after this relative had her head cut off and her headless body was taken away, her wide dress rustled, and a tiny little dog jumped from it, howling. It was exactly that kind of little dog—the same breed—that a few centuries later turned up hidden—also during a murder—in the sleeve of Mary Stuart’s descendant—a grand duchess. Everything comes back, everything.”
“In my end is my beginning.” A sacrifice. Did the last emperor really understand that?
——
Of course, I tried to believe my guest’s story. In Perm I was able to find Sergei Lyukhanov’s aged son—that same Alexei, the heir’s namesake.
In the cramped, pitiful little room where the driver of the terrible truck had lived and died I wrote down from Alexei’s words his father’s biography:
“My father, Sergei Ivanovich Lyukhanov, was born in 1875, in Chelyabinsk District, in a peasant family. A fourth-grade education. Beginning in 1894 worked in the Stepanov brothers’ mill. In 1900 moved to Chelyabinsk, where he worked until 1916 for the Pokrovsky Brothers Company running an electric telephone station. He worked too as the Pokrovskys’ personal driver and would go to Petersburg with them. In 1899 he married Avgusta Dmitrievna Avdeyeva (she was four years younger than he, had finished grammar school, and worked as a teacher).
“In 1900 their oldest son Valentin was born, who served with his father in the Ipatiev house guard. Then came Vladimir, myself (in 1910), and a daughter Antonina. In 1907 he joined the Bolshevik Party. In the summer of 1916 he got a job in the Zlokazov brothers’ factory as a machinist. Later Avgusta’s brother, Alexander Avdeyev, the future commandant of the Ipatiev house, came there from Chelyabinsk. Lyukhanov set him up at the factory as machinist’s assistant and did all his work, since Avdeyev didn’t know how to do anything.
“My father never reminisced or talked about the Ekaterinburg period of his life.
“After the surrender of Ekaterinburg in 1918, the Lyukhanovs went to Osa in Perm District, where my father got a job at a lumber mill.
“Soon after that he and my mother separated over something. In 1921 she returned to Ekaterinburg with all the children and worked there as the director of children’s homes. On March 23, 1924, she died of typhus. Dying, she asked Serzh (as she called father) to be told that she had been wrong. Her oldest son did not carry out her request and only shortly before his death did my father learn from me about my mother’s last words. What I said greatly agitated him, and he was very upset not to find about it until the end of his life.
“Avgusta Dmitrievna is buried in Sverdlovsk in the Mikhailov Cemetery. After her death I was given up to a children’s home, and my uncle—Avdeyev—took my sister Antonina to Moscow. From 1918 to 1926 my father worked in Osa, where he was in charge of an electric station. In 1923 he married a second time to a German, a German language teacher, Galina Karlovna (who died in 1928). Between 1926 and 1939 my father moved many times—he had jobs in various towns in the Urals—but wherever he worked he was a mechanic. Finally, in 1939, he reached Perm. After the war and up until 1952 he worked as a lathe operator in an infectious hospital there. He worked hard and long and was always fixing all sorts of household utensils for the hospital workers. (He never took more than a ruble for his work.) He worked until he was eighty, and he never suspected he was entitled to a pension. He was very taciturn, he spoke rarely. Beginning in 1944 he lived with me and my second wife in our room at 30 Twenty-fifth of October Street. He died in 1954 and is buried in an old cemetery in Perm.”
All this was nearly a word-for-word repetition of what my guest had already told me. When I asked about my guest, Lyukhanov’s son replied vaguely: “I think someone did come and meet with Father.… I think he was here again after my father died, too.” That was all eighty-year-old Alexei could tell me. In parting, Alexei Lyukhanov gave me all his father’s remaining documents. Among them was a “Certificate” issued to Sergei Lyukhanov by the Pokrovsky Brothers Company in 1899, decorated with a tsarist medal and a profile of the man whose body he drove in his truck. And a photograph. One of the last. In which the former truck driver is a pathetic little old man.
I never saw my guest again, but I often think of him. And about what he told me. It was all too entertaining. As a rule, the truth is very boring.
Although … although at times I think my guest knew a lot more than he told me. And then I recall Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet).
In any event, I thought of my strange guest again when I received this letter from a psychiatrist, Dr. D. Kaufman of Petrozavodsk:
“This will be about a man who for a time was in treatment in a psychiatric hospital in Petrozavodsk, where I worked on staff from September 1946 to October 1949, after graduating from the Second Leningrad Medical Institute, now a medical hygiene institute.
“… Our patient load consisted of both civilians and prisoners, whom we were sent during those years for treatment or for legal-psychiatric examination.
“… In 1947 or 1948 in the wintertime another prisoner came to us as a patient. He was suffering from severe psychosis of the type called hysterical psychogenic reaction. His mind was not clear, he was disoriented, he did not understand where he was.… He waved his arms about and tried to run away.… Amid incoherent utterances in a mass of other expressive exclamations the name ‘Beloborodov’ flashed by two or three times. At first we paid no attention to it, since it didn’t mean anything to us. From his accompanying documents … we found out he had been in the camps for a long time and that his psychosis had developed suddenly, when he had attempted to defend a woman (prisoner) from being beaten by a guard. He was tied up and, naturally, ‘worked over.’ Although as far as I recall no visible bodily injuries were noted when he entered the hospital. His documents indicated his date of birth as 1904; as for his first and last names, I can’t remember them exactly. The variations I recall are the following: Semyon Grigorievich Filippov, or Filipp Grigorievich Semyonov. After one to three days, as usually happens in these cases, the manifestation of severe psychosis had disappeared completely. The patient became calm, in full contact. Clear awareness and proper behavior were maintained from then on for his entire stay at the hospital. His appearance, as far as I can say, was like this: a rather tall man, somewhat stout, sloping shoulders, slightly round-shouldered, and so on. A long, pale face, blue or gray, slightly bulging eyes, a high forehead receding into a balding head, the remaining hair chestnut with gray….”
(After this she talked about how the patient was sincere with her.)
“… So, it became known to us that he was the heir to the crown, that during the hasty execution in Ekaterinburg his father had hugged and pressed his face to him so that he wouldn’t see the rifle barrels aimed at him. In my opinion, he had not even realized that something terrible was going on since the commands to fire were uttered unexpectedly, and he didn’t hear the sentence read. All he remembered was the name Beloborodov.… Shots rang out, he was wounded in the buttocks, he lost consciousness, and he collapsed on a common heap of bodies. When he woke up, he found he had been saved, someone had dragged him out of the cellar, carried him out, and ministered to him for a long time.”
Then followed the story of his further life and the stupidities that led him to the camp. But the most interesting part came at the end of this long letter.
“Gradually we began to look at him with other eyes. The persistent hematuria he suffered from found an explanation. The heir had had hemophilia. On the patient’s buttocks was an old cross-shaped scar.… Finally we realized who the patient’s appearance reminded us of—the famous portraits of Nicholas, not only Nicholas I but Nicholas II … Dressed in a quilted jacket and striped pajama trousers over felt boots instead of a hussar’s uniform.
“… At that time consultants used to come to us from Leningrad for two or three months at a time.… Professor S. I. Gendelevich was consulting with us then. The best psychiatric practitioner I ever met. Naturally, we showed him our patient.… For two or three hours he ‘pursued’ him with questions we could not have asked, since we were not conversant, but it turned out he was. So, for example, the consultant knew the layout and use of every room in the Winter Palace and the country residences in the early part of the century. He knew the names and titles of all the members of the tsar’s family and the branched network of the dynasty, all the court positions,… and so on. The consultant also knew the accepted protocol for all the court ceremonies and rituals as well as the dates of the various name days in the tsar’s family and other ceremonies marked in the Romanov family circle. To all these questions the patient responded utterly accurately and without the slightest thought. For him it was as elementary as a primer.… From a few answers it was clear that he possessed wider knowledge in this sphere.… His behavior was as always: calm and dignified. Then the consultant asked the women to leave and he examined the patient below the waist, in front and in back. When we walked in (the patient had been dismissed) the consultant was blatantly dismayed. It turned out that the patient had a cryptorchidism (one testicle had not descended), which the consultant knew had been noted in the dead heir Alexei. We had not known that….
“… The consultant explained the situation to us: there was a dilemma and we needed to make a joint decision—either put a diagnosis of ‘paranoia’ in a stage of good remission with the possibility of employing the patient in his former occupations at his place of confinement, or consider the case unresolved and in need of additional observation in the hospital. In that case, however, we would be obliged to motivate our decision carefully for the organs of procuratorial oversight, which would inevitably send a special investigator from Moscow.… Having weighed these possibilities, we considered it to the patient’s good to give him a definite diagnosis of paranoia, of which we were not entirely certain, and return him to camp.… The patient agreed with our decision about returning to camp (naturally he was not told his diagnosis) and we parted friends.”
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br /> Dr. Kaufman’s letter was so eloquent that I wondered whether I wasn’t a victim of mystification. I believed her.
——
Here is a letter from the deputy chief physician of Psychiatric Hospital Number 1 in the Karelian ASSR, V. E. Kiviniemi, who verified this patient’s medical history, which is kept in the hospital archives:
“In my hands is medical history no. 64 for F. G. Semyonov, born 1904, admitted to psychiatric hospital January 14, 1949. Noted in red pencil ‘prisoner.’ … Released from the hospital April 22, 1949, to ITK [corrective labor camp] No. 1 (there is the signature of the convoy head, Mikheyev).
“Semyonov was admitted to the hospital from the ITK clinic. The doctor’s order … describes the patient’s acute psychotic condition and indicates that Semyonov kept ‘cursing someone named Beloborodov.’ Entered the psychiatric hospital in a weakened physical condition, but without acute signs of psychosis.… From the moment he entered was polite, sociable, behaved with dignity and modesty, neat. A doctor in the medical history notes that in conversation he did not conceal his origins. ‘His manners, tone, and conviction speak to the fact that he was familiar with the life of high society before 1917.’ F. G. Semyonov told how he was tutored at home, that he was the son of the former tsar, that he had been rescued during the time when the family perished, was taken to Leningrad, where he lived for a certain period of time, served in the Red Army as a cavalryman, studied at an economics institute (evidently in Baku), after graduating worked as an economist in Central Asia, was married, his wife’s name was Asya, and then said that Beloborodov knew his secret and was blackmailing him.… In February 1949 was examined by a psychiatrist from Leningrad, Gendelevich, to whom Semyonov declared that he had nothing to gain from appropriating someone else’s name, that he was not expecting any privileges, since he understood that various anti-Soviet elements might gather around his name and so as not to cause any trouble he was always prepared to leave this life. In April 1949 Semyonov underwent a forensic psychiatric examination and was declared emotionally ill and in need of placement in an Internal Affairs Ministry psychiatric hospital. This last must be regarded as a humanitarian act toward Semyonov for that time, since there is a difference between a camp and a hospital. Semyonov himself regarded it positively.”
The Last Tsar Page 50