The Last Tsar (69 page)

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.”

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.”

Appended to this missive was the strange patient’s letter to his wife Asya.

——

A short while later I received a call from an old man, a former prisoner, who turned out to have been in the camps with the mysterious Semyonov—all the prisoners called him “the tsar’s son,” and they all believed it absolutely.

At my request, the Central State Archive of the October Revolution made a copy of several pages of Alexei’s 1916 diary kept there. I took it, along with the letter the strange patient sent his wife Asya from the hospital in 1949, to the Institute of Criminology. They tried to help, but … but the documents proved incomparable. The letter to Asya, written in an elegant, refined hand. And the diary of thirteen-year-old Alexei, with his uneven scribbles. They were unable to say yes or no.

On the eve of the execution in the Ipatiev house, the chairman of the Ural Cheka, F. N. Lukoyanov, suddenly and unexpectedly left for Perm—to transfer the Cheka archives. The chief of the entire Ural Cheka, the man in charge of the “special mission,” was not present when his mission was carried out! Was he not able to conquer his feelings? Was he not able to be there?

In any event, he remained in Perm during the execution.

Soon after, in 1919, Feodor Lukoyanov suffered a severe nervous breakdown, which afflicted him for the rest of his life.

The former chairman of the Ural Cheka died in 1947—on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Ipatiev night. He did not survive the anniversary. He is buried in his hometown of Perm.

In the 1930s, the most prominent party members were sent to the camps, to death, one after another. In 1935 it was their families’ turn. Beautiful Rimma Yurovskaya, the Komsomol favorite, was arrested
and sent to a camp. Yurovsky rushed to Goloshchekin for help, but Goloshchekin could not help him.

Now Yurovsky had to prove that the party was his family. And if the party needed his daughter….

As before, he continued to meet in Medvedev’s apartment and reminisce. About the same old thing. The execution. There was nothing else in their lives. They reminisced prosaically about the Apocalypse over a cup of tea. And they discussed who really did fire first. Yurovsky had precedence. Precedence—for the realization of his dream. He was a Jew. Once the monarchists got the ball rolling, the tsar’s murder was declared an act of Jewish revenge.

The son of Chekist Medvedev:

“Once Yurovsky arrived triumphant—he had been brought a book that had come out in the West where it was written in black and white that it was he, Yurovsky, who killed Nicholas. He was happy—he had left his mark in history.”

Their old friend Sasha Beloborodov, then the people’s commissar for internal affairs, never came to these gatherings. Like Yurovsky’s daughter Rimma, Beloborodov had supported Trotsky. He had been excluded from the party, repented, and reformed. And he had been restored.

From a letter of Natalia Bialer:

“In the 1930s our family lived in the embassy in Paris. My father Akim Yakovlevich Bialer was secretary to the military attaché. In 1935 my father brought home a man whom he introduced as Nikolai Alexeyevich Sokolov. Was that his real name? I don’t know. People did not always come from the USSR under their own name. Why have I remembered him? After all, I saw quite a few people at the embassy and in our house who were famous in their day. Some came with their suites, like Chkalov [a famous Soviet pilot], Tukhachevsky and Yakir [first marshals of the Soviet army].… He had been sent to Paris personally by Voroshilov [head of the army]. To see an oncologist whose name I think was Professor Roccard. My father knew him. Roccard made a diagnosis—throat cancer—and refused to treat him. When Voroshilov was informed of this, he ordered that the man be given a course of treatment anyway. Ambassador V. P. Potemkin himself went to see Roccard, after which a course of treatment was prescribed, including strained, semiliquid food—five times a day. It was my mother who cooked that food for Sokolov. My mother and I
drove Sokolov to his treatments, walked with him all over Paris, and generally spent all day with him.… I am writing about this in detail so that you understand why Sokolov was candid with my mother. He knew full well that his end was imminent. He told my mother that he had been in charge of the detachment that had executed the tsar’s family. He considered that a sin on his conscience.… When we returned to Moscow, my father told us that Sokolov had died in the Kremlin hospital in 1938.… My mother told me this story in the late 1960s, after my father’s death, since she had given him her word that it would remain between them forever.”