Thirteen Years Later

Historical Note

The official record tells us that Tsar Alexander I entered immortality in Taganrog on 19 November 1825, attended by his wife and his closest advisors. But almost immediately, rumours began to circulate that he had not died but had faked his own death, in order to abdicate a crown with which he had never felt comfortable. The tale was that he lived out the remainder of his long life in the guise of an impoverished holy man, by the name of Fyodor Kuzmich, dying finally in Tomsk in 1864. If Alexander and Kuzmich were one and the same, then he would have been eighty-six years old. While many historians regard these stories as worth little more than a footnote, within the Romanov family itself they were widely held to be true. As recently as 1958, the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of the last tsar, Nicholas II, is quoted as saying, ‘I am old and not long for this world; you are young and apparently have understanding of these things. You should know that we have no doubt that Fyodor Kuzmich was the emperor.’