The Stories of the Tsar Monk

He carried no identification. Even on penalty of twenty lashings, he refused to provide any further information about himself. He held himself high and calm throughout the entire interrogation. And so the man calling himself Fyodor Kuzmich was lashed. Then he was exiled to Siberia as a convict in the forty third Exile settlement at Bogotolsk. He was sentenced to labor at a vodka distillery, but within a few months the director meekly said that Fyodor Kousmitch didn't need to

work anymore. No one quite knew why. Rumors flew on the streets of Crossnufemsk, quickly spreading along the winding roads of Russia as winter settled in. There was no way this mysterious stranger was just some peasant or monk. He was too well spoken, too high minded in his bearing. He had to have noble blood. Perhaps he was an

imperial criminal in disguise, running from a wicked past. At last, a Siberian girl who had had one audience with the Tsar Nicholas the First returned home, my dear father, Fyodor Kusmisch. She said, you look exactly like Nicholas's brother, the former Czar Alexander the First. But that was impossible, saw Alexander the First had died eleven years earlier. The holy man went white. Then the normally good natured Cousmich raised his voice in shocking anger.

heir to the powerful Romanov dynasty. He was the Emperor of Russia for a quarter of a century, the victor against Napoleon Bonaparte's doomed invasion of Russia, and the complicated emperor later described by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. And he had been a hardy, healthy man all his life until he died suddenly in eighteen twenty five at the age of forty seven. His death could not have been under stranger circumstances. The place of his death was

a remote outpost far from the Imperial court. The supposed illness had no reliable witnesses and led to endless contradictory medical reports. The autopsy was delayed, the embalming was rushed. The coffin at the funeral remained strangely closed. The CSAR had been becoming more religious four years he was wrecked with guilt over the assassinate of his father, which had

brought him to the throne. He spoke of wanting to abdicate by the time he hit fifty, and then at forty seven death by mysterious illness, and later in eighteen thirty six, eleven years after his suspicious death, a man with no past showed up bearing a striking resemblance to the supposedly dead emperor. It would be almost impossible to fake one's own death and abandon the throne and its

forty four million subjects. To pull off a scheme like that, it would take someone with absolute power, immense motivating guilt, and an iron will. In other words, someone exactly like the forty seven year old Alexander the First. I'm Danish war and this is noble blood. The futures are Alexander Pavlovitch was born on December twenty third, seventeen seventy seven in Saint Petersburg, during the reign of his famous grandmother,

Katherine the Great. Catherine was so enamored of her young grandson that she wanted him to inherit the throne when she died instead of Alex's father, Katherine's son Paul, but it was not to be. Catherine died in seventeen ninety six. When Alexander was eighteen, and his father, Paul took over as emperor. He was as unpopular as everyone had expected. Sir Paul the First was despotic and censorous, punishing people for every minor infraction against whatever random rule he had decided,

like inviting too many people to dinner. He was paranoid about a conspiracy against him, like the conspiracy his mother Catherine the Great had orchestrated to take the throne that had once belonged to his father. Paul would lock his bedroom door at night so his wife couldn't come in and kill him. Alexander hated his father's behavior as emperor, so when a plot to assassinate Paul took shape, it's

almost certain that Alexander knew about it. He almost certainly approved it, at least tacitly, but how involved was he in it, that's a different story. Almost certainly, Alexander hadn't fully imagined the horror of his own father, dressed in a night shirt, cowering as assassins strangled him to death in his own bedroom. It was a horrifying image that would haunt Alexander for the rest of his life, regardless of whether that life ended at forty seven or not.

Alexander rose to the Russian throne in eighteen oh one, a handsome twenty three year old seemingly blessed by God to rule Russia. Napoleon, then consul of France, found Alexander equivocal and insincere, noting quote, something is missing in his character, but I find it impossible to discover what Napoleon was sort of right, there would always be something a little uncertain about who alex was inside. Like plenty of people, he was liberal when he was young and powerless, and

became more conservative once he gained power. Alexander became emperor in hopes of implementing a con institutional government. Twenty years into his reign, that was out the window. He originally wanted to give the serfs of Russia a little power. Later he undid any early reforms. We're talking, Can you banish a Serf to Siberia forever just for claiming they were insolent? Yes? Or no? And in the end alex said sure. Once allied with Napoleon and the French, he

later claimed a heroic victory against the French invasion. Eventually his father's despotic rules came back. Alex even instituted a military colony that determined marriages by lot, a system that feels straight out of a dystopian young adult novel. As his reign continued, he became more and more religious in his own way. He kept company with self styled prophets and prophetesses, but most interesting, he spoke of an internal church full of mysticism, different from the external church of

his Orthodox faith. Maybe that was his insincerity, again, evidence that his external self was different from his internal spiritual truths. Or maybe it was some desire growing inside of him for a simple spiritual life detached from the only life he could ever have as the ruler of Russia and territories of Finland and Poland. As Alexander's reign stretched into the eighteen twenties, he became paranoid reclusive and obsessively clean, and like his father before him, he became less and

less popular. He feared a coup against him. In eighteen twenty four, his illegitimate daughter Sophie died of tuberculosis at only eighteen years old, and Alexander fell into a deep depression. I receive punishment for all the errors of my ways, he said, and those around him exchanged glances. He must have been thinking of his murderous rise to the throne, the assassination of his father. He began talking more and

more openly about wanting to resign the throne. In front of his younger brother Constantine and their youngest brother, Nicholas, alex said, I should tell you, my brother, that I want to abdicate. When the time has come, I will let you know. By eighteen twenty five, Alexander was forty seven and his wife Elizabeth was forty six. Elizabeth became ill, and alex became single mindedly obsessed with her health. She could not stay in the cold capital of Saint Petersburg.

He decided she was coughing too terribly. His dear wife had to leave the capital, and he had to go with her. And here we find one more curious piece of instability in Czar Alexander's sphinx like character, the forty something man suddenly became so devoted to a wife that he had spent the past thirty years basically indifferent too. They'd gotten married when he was fifteen and she was fourteen, but they had always been distant with each other. They

both had other lovers. Alexander had illegitimate children with at least four different women, and here he was forty seven years old, increasingly religious, openly wanting to abdicate, and committed to leaving the capital due to a brand new, deep and abiding love for his ailing wife. But whatever his reasons, the royal physicians agreed with his plan for Elizabeth. Winter in Saint Petersburg would be unacceptable for a woman in her condition. Perhaps the Emperor and Empress would enjoy the

Crimean coast, or southern Italy or France. No, Alexander said they would go to Taganrouc, a small, unimpressive port city right on the shore of the Black Sea. The place made no sense to anyone but Alexander, but Alexander was the Emperor. What he said went so. In late summer eighteen twenty five. He kissed his mother goodbye and set off for to Gunroc, far from the prying eyes of the royal court. Perhaps he spared a glance back at

the capital city as it receded in the distance. Maybe he was sorrowful or regretful, or maybe he only felt the steely grip of commitment to a decision that had already been made. Maybe he already knew when he departed that it was to be his final journey as Emperor of Russia. Here is where the story gets sticky. Interpret the following facts however you will. Are they evidence of an elaborate, planned fake death or simply of a tragic, sudden real one. Alexander and Elizabeth set off on the

fourteen hundred mile journey south in separate coaches. On the way, Alexander stopped at a monastery where he visited a monk who slept no joke in an actual coffin. It's hard to imagine the Emperor of Russia could have seen that and thought it looked great, But who knows. Maybe he really was that sick of the throne. He reached to Ganrag when his wife met him there, they walked hand in hand like lovers on a honeymoon. Elizabeth wrote daily in her diary, and here are some facts about what

Alexander was doing. Make of them what you will. One day, Alexander paid a strange visit to a hospital, where he asked a whole lot of questions about specifically the nature of malaria. Another day, he opened an oyster to find some kind of worm inside. Against all possible modern intuition and what feels like universal common sense, a doctor told him that it was fine, and Alexander ate the whole thing. It wasn't until November that the Czar went out riding

and came back unable to stop shivering. Soon he was feverish, yellow skinned, tired, weak, and unquenchably thirsty. Elizabeth started writing fearful letters to her How could Alexander be the sick one now when he'd been so extremely healthy all his life. From here, listener, no one can get the story straight. The czar, who would later succeed Alexander, his younger brother Nicholas, destroyed many of the records of Alex's reign. So we have the testimony of a few doctors and attendants, plus

Elizabeth's diary and letters to her mother. And here's what's really odd. They all give contradictory reports. Was Alexander refusing medication or was he obeying the doctors and improving. Did he pass a calm night or a scarily turbulent one. Did he collapse while shaving in the morning, or did he collapse while getting up from the couch in the evening. It's hard to imagine an actual illness so elusive and

difficult to document. But does that mean that every doctor, attendant and empress there had been asked to become a fiction writer instead, each making up their own version of the progression of an illness that didn't exist. As the illness progressed, According to our sources, Alexander would wake from a near stupor whenever his wife was near. He would hold her hand, and one day he called Elizabeth to his room. They closed the door and spent six hours together,

something that had never happened before. We don't know what they said to each other. Maybe he instructed her as to how to fake his death, or maybe they exchanged tearful goodbyes because he was dying or because he was leaving her by choice. Either way, her husband was going away forever. It's hard to imagine which would be worse, whether he was dying or simply disappearing his own free will. Either way, Elizabeth came out of the six hour meeting

and wrote nothing in her diary. Again. She had been keeping a daily log since arriving in Taganuk, and after that she stopped. So all we know is that on December one, eighteen twenty five, Czar Alexander the First of Russia died. Whether the man himself died or merely his identity as czar is a different question. The autopsy, as reported to us by History, did not commence for thirty six hours, an unusually long time. Alexander had been kicked by a horse earlier in his life and had discoloration

on his left leg. The body allegedly had discoloration on the right. Alexander's body was so putrified by the time it got to the embalmers that they had to smoke cigars to bear the stench. The Imperial family was invited to view the body only at midnight, and priests were

barred from the room. Alexander's mother loudly proclaimed, yes, this is my son, but others seemed disturbed by the extreme state of degradation of the body's face, which was discolored and looked very little like the Alexander they had known, and throughout the funerary procession and the funeral, despite Orthodox tradition, despite the calls of the public, and despite the whispers about a faked death that were already passing through the crowd,

the casket remained closed. Eleven years later, Fyodor Kuzmitch turned up on a white horse in a remote Russian village, bearing a striking resemblance to the Emperor, bearing a regal comportment. Despite his lowly status, and refusing at all costs to share any information at all about his true identity. He was a Startz, a Russian holy man, a word that sounds to English ears pardon my pronunciation, but when correctly pronounced,

sounds incredibly close to Tsar. Fyodor Kuzmitch gained a following as a good religious man, and even in his lifetime people suspected that he was secretly Tsar Alexander, the First disguised by the passage of time and by the peasant garb he wore. Not only did this man speak French, not only did the peasant girl under his care enjoy

a visitation with Tsar Nicholas himself. Not only did he know intricate details of the war between Russia and France, not only did he hang an icon of the patron saint of Tsar Alexander the First, but more strange rumors abounded him once he was visited by a young man whom observers took to be Nicholas the First's son, Alexander

the Second, who would have been the Tsar's nephew. Once the holy man was in another room as a family read aloud historical words that Alexander the First spoke to Napoleon. According to the family's daughter's diary, a voice rang out from Fyodor Kuzmitch's quarters. I never said that the voice said, whoever he really was? Fyodor Kuzmich died in eighteen sixty four. If he was Alexander in disguise, he would have been

eighty seven years old. On his deathbed, Theodor was asked one final time, who are you really, And, just as he had done when he was first questioned by police nearly thirty years earlier, he gave no answer. Instead, he pointed to a small bag. Here lies my secret, he said, and then he died. Inside the bag were six pieces of paper written in what seemed to be a secret code. Whatever the truth of the man's identity, Fyodor Kuzmich left it a cipher. He was as sphinx like as the

Tsar before him. Fyodor Kusmitch was buried in a tomb inscribed with the words Blessed by God, the very same words that the Senate had used to decorate Tsar Alexander the first. This podcast has done several episodes about pretenders to the throne, but Fyodor Kusmitch was different. He wasn't claiming to be the Czar. If there was any pretending going on, it wasn't pretending to be the emperor. It

was pretending not to be. But how could Czar Alexander have pulled off the switcheroo if he didn't really die in Taganrog at the age of forty seven, How could he have faked his own death, kept it a secret, disappeared for eleven years, and then reappeared to live out the rest of his long life as a reclusive monk. Believers in the legend have proposed some answers. The doctors

and Empress at Taganrog would have been sworn to secrecy. Naturally, that would explain their inconsistent testimony about the Tsar's final days. Their testimony was all made up. The body in the coffee would have been someone else's, perhaps a servant who had died before Alexander's supposed death date. That would explain why the body was so discolored and decomposed, and why it smelled so bad for the embalmers, and perhaps why it had taken so long to arrange an autopsy in

the first place. Where Alexander went for the eleven years before reappearing as Fyodor Cosmich is a harder question. One theory is that he boarded a British yacht. There was indeed one such ship in Taganrog, which set sail on the day of Alexander's supposed death. That would explain Alexander's choice of a port city, but one that was rarely used and thus less scrutinized. From there, the best that the historical rumor grapevine can speculate is that he may

have gone to Jerusalem. After all, what more logical place would there be to spend eleven years in the kind of mystical, pious, and unbothered seclusion that he had wanted so desperately as Czar. Some rumors even say Elizabeth faked her death too, and became a nun called Vera the Silent. If you're hearing some skepticism from me, that's correct. As I was researching this episode, I was open to believing the legend, and I still am. But in the end, the whole thing seems to me like a lot of

wanting to believe. The simplest explanation is that a depressed middle aged man in the early eighteen hundreds became ill, possibly after eating a bad oyster. But there's something kind of beautiful and sad about how people so deeply want the story of the deathless Monarch to be true. It's like cheating death yourself to believe that there's actually some divine power out there somewhere that isn't subject to the

capriciousness of illness or injury. To believe that some people, even if they aren't you, even if they're only the rulers allegedly ordained by God, really are outside the grip of death. One person who believes in the Imperial legend was Alexis Tribetskoy, a minor Russian prince who wrote a book about the story. At the end of the book, he boldly states that he wrote it partially to drum up interest in a DNA analysis of the bodies in

the tombs. It is the author's great hope. He wrote that an adventurous sponsor with an historical bent will come forward to finance the exploration. Tribetskoy died in twenty seventeen, never knowing the answer. Unfortunately, DNA analysis has been promised but never yet performed. But the pure strain of his belief, the boylike faith in the miraculous fairy tale, is almost painfully sweet, and it makes me want to believe too.

It's a much better story. But when I look at the totality of the evidence, I can't quite believe it. I can't shake the fact that the whole legend rests on how odd it is that a healthy forty seven year old suddenly died during a historical period when no one questioned the death of his daughter at eighteen or the extreme illness of his wife the same age as him. Fyodor Kusmitch was almost certainly not low born. He was probably covering up someone that he had been, possibly a nobleman,

but that doesn't necessarily mean he was Alexander. If Alexander didn't fake his own death, then his final weeks in retrospect are heartbreaking. There's something very sad about a man deeply in love with his wife at long last dying just as their love was kindling. He was open to abdicating the throne, ready to live the life he wanted. I think stories and fairy tales and hopes often come out of what is just too sad to be allowed

to be real. But hey, what do I know. Tsar Alexander the Third, our Alexander's great nephew, supposedly hung a portrait of Fyodor Kusmich alongside a portrait of Alexander the First. Alexis Trebetskoy swears that the sister of Tsar Nicholas the Second personally told him that her family had no doubt that Alexander and Theodor were the same man. Leo Tolstoy wrote an unfinished story from the perspective of Fyodor Kusmich,

confessing his true identity was Alexander and it's Russia. Don't forget Russian leaders are no strangers to censoring inconvenient truths. The Tsars that followed Alexander had every reason to suppress evidence that Theodor Kusmich was the czar. If Alexander was still living for another forty years, it would have thrown the entire reign of Nicholas the First into question, and then the reign of his son Alexander the Second, who

became Tsar while Fyodor Kusmich was still alive. In twenty fifteen, the president of the Russian Graphicological Society, a handwriting expert, compared the writing of the tsar and the monk, and she came to a stunn conclusion. The Emperor, Alexander the First and Fyodor Kusmitch, she said, were one and the same man. So who knows? I think maybe I just convinced myself that's the story of Alexander the First and

the legend of his reappearance as a monk. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about other possibilities for who Fyodor Cousmich might have been. Whoever Fyodor Cousmich was, he was almost certainly not low born. Whether or not he was the Czar Alexander the First in disguise, He was probably covering up someone that he had been in a past life, probably a nobleman.

the illegitimate son of Paul the First. Fyodor Kusmitch had been known to correspond with a count who had married into Simeon's family. There was even a member of that family who had been named Fyodor Cousmitch. Simeon the half brother supposedly died at sea, but there are no naval records of his life death. If he reappeared as the Monk, then Theodor Cousmitt would have been Alexander's half brother, which would explain his noble bearing and his undeniable resemblance to the enigmatic lost Czar.

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