The Stories of the Tsar Monk

In 1836, a stranger arrived to a remote Russian town on a snow-white horse. The man spoke fluent French and had a noble bearing, but he refused to give any information about where he came from or who his family was. And then someone noticed a striking resemblance to the former Tsar, Alexander I. The only problem? Tsar Alexander I had been dead for eleven years.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Listener Discretion advised. It was
a cold September day in eighteen thirty six when the
police arrested an enigmatic newcomer to the remote Russian town

(00:22):
of Crossnufimsk. The man looked to be about fifty something.
He was tall and handsome, regal in comportment, and although
he was wearing a peasant's tunic, he had ridden into
town on a towering.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Horse of the purest white. Outside the cross Neufimsk police station,
a cold wind blew inside. The Russian police questioned the
stranger relentlessly, where was he from, who was his family?
What did he do for a living. But the man

(01:01):
only said that his name was Fyodor Kuzmitch, he was
a believer in the Orthodox Church. And then he offered
nothing more. No family members, names, no hometown, no home,
no suggestion at all about what his past might have been.
He carried no identification. Even on penalty of twenty lashings,

(01:26):
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

(01:48):
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

(02:13):
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,

(02:38):
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

(03:01):
the First had died eleven years earlier. The holy man
went white. Then the normally good natured Cousmich raised his
voice in shocking anger.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Why would you say.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
That to me, he said threateningly to the Siberian girl.
He stormed out of the room and spoke no more,
And so began the Imperial Russian legend that never dies
was the orthodox Saint Fyodor Kusmitch actually Alexander the First,

(03:37):
former Emperor of Russia. Did the Tsar Alexander fake his
own death and live out the rest of his days
as a holy peasant. Alexander the First had been the
cherished grandson of Catherine the Great. He was a handsome
heir to the powerful Romanov dynasty. He was the Emperor

(04:00):
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

(04:23):
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.

(04:48):
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

(05:09):
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

(05:32):
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

(05:54):
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

(06:16):
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.

(06:39):
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,

(07:00):
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

(07:21):
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

(07:43):
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

(08:08):
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,

(08:34):
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

(08:57):
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

(09:19):
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

(09:39):
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

(10:04):
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

(10:24):
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,

(10:48):
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.

(11:08):
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

(11:31):
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,

(11:53):
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

(12:18):
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

(12:41):
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

(13:04):
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

(13:27):
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

(13:48):
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

(14:09):
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

(14:32):
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

(14:53):
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,

(15:14):
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

(15:37):
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

(15:58):
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

(16:20):
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

(16:41):
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,

(17:01):
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

(17:22):
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

(17:42):
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

(18:06):
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

(18:29):
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

(18:51):
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

(19:13):
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,

(19:38):
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,

(20:00):
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,

(20:25):
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

(20:46):
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

(21:06):
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

(21:28):
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.

(21:51):
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

(22:14):
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

(22:34):
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

(23:05):
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

(23:25):
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

(23:46):
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

(24:09):
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

(24:30):
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

(24:53):
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

(25:15):
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

(25:36):
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

(26:00):
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

(26:23):
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

(26:45):
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

(27:06):
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.

(27:29):
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

(27:53):
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

(28:14):
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

(28:35):
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

(29:00):
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.

(29:21):
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

(29:41):
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

(30:03):
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

(30:24):
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

(30:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
But who.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
One option is a a nobleman named Fyodor Uvov, a
cavalry officer in the Russian Wars against a Napoleon, which
would explain the monks knowledge of the war. Fyodor Uvarov
disappeared without a trace in eighteen twenty seven, along with
all known portraits of him. Police always suspected that his

(31:21):
wife knew something she wasn't telling, and she never fully
committed to calling herself a widow. But the more tantalizing
possibility is that Fyodor Kusmich was Alexander's own half brother, Simeon,
the illegitimate son of Paul the First. Fyodor Kusmitch had

(31:41):
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,

(32:03):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is created and
hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching
by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and
Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi

(32:44):
Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain
and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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