Russia: The Czar Who Wouldn't Die

On the grey, gull-studded morning of Dec. 1, 1825, the Azov seaport of Taganrog echoed to the tolling of death bells. Alexander I, conqueror of Napoleon, keystone of the Holy Alliance, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias, was dead at 48. With him had passed the hopes of the peasantry for reforms and freedoms that he had long espoused; after him came an era of intermittent repression and misrule that led finally to the Bolshevik Revolution. But had Alexander really died? Last week in Moscow, a Soviet writer once again exhumed a 140-year-old legend that Alexander faked his death, then took up a 39-year life of humble repentance as a wandering starets (holy man) in Siberia.

Mistresses & Malaria. The legend goes like this. Alexander, never very stable, was haunted by the memory of his murdered father, Paul I, and half-crazed by a sense of guilt for Napoleon's burning of Moscow. A handsome rakehell, Alexander had latterly fallen under the influence of Baroness Barbara Juliana von Kriüdener, a Baltic Billy Sunday who converted the Czar into a rabid religious mystic. Thus in 1825 he decided to change his life.

In a Crimean hospital, Alexander came across a dying army officer who closely resembled him, even down to a scar on the leg. When the soldier died, Alexander's physician allowed the body to decompose just enough to blur its features. Meanwhile Alexander took to his bed, ostensibly with malaria or typhoid. When the time was ripe, the corpse was brought up to the Emperor's room in a covered bathtub; Alexander was smuggled out the same way to a yacht belonging to the first Earl of Cathcart, former British Ambassador to Russia and a close friend of Alexander's. It slipped quietly out of the harbor the next day, bearing south and east to the Holy Land, where a "mysterious passenger"—ostensibly Alexander-made a tour of sacred shrines. The coffin was opened only once en route to the capital, and then only immediate relatives were permitted to look inside.

Crime & Punishment. There is an eleven-year gap in the legend—until 1836, when a tall stranger with a flowing beard and erect military bearing rode into the Siberian outpost of Krasnoufimsk on a white horse. He carried his right hand on his hip in the manner of the late Czar; he spoke fluent French and a kind of Russian that was half church-Slavic, half Latin; he carried an icon with the initials A.I. The peasants began to wonder if this might not be Alexander the Blessed. When the stranger, who gave his name as Fyodor Kuzmich but could produce no papers to prove it, was sentenced to 20 lashes for vagrancy, a strange thing happened. Out from Moscow rode Grand Duke Michael, Alexander's younger brother. He personally threatened the judge with a lashing of his own. But after talking privately and reverentially with Kuzmich, Michael relented and left. Other Romanovs visited the holy man: Czarevich Alexander, namesake of his uncle and soon to bear the imperial title, arrived and kissed Kuzmich's hand.