Authors: Mary McGrigor
Finally the intriguing question remains as to who Feodor Kuzmich really was, if not Tsar Alexander as people finally took him to be?
One possibility, suggested by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, is that this man, so obviously well educated and knowledgeable about events at the court of St Petersburg and of incidents in the Romanov family life, was Simeon, the illegitimate son of Tsar Paul and a mistress of his called Sophia Chertorzhskaya.
93
This would certainly explain the physical resemblance to Alexander, Simeon being his half-brother. Simeon, however, having been educated in St Petersburg, had then gone to England where he had joined the Royal Navy and served on
HMS
Vanguard
. Supposedly he died of fever or else was drowned in the Baltic, but neither version is verified and the grand duke failed to find any official record of his death.
Alternatively, it has been suggested that Kuzmich was a man of noble birth, possibly Nikolai Andreyevsky, a cavalry officer, who became a chamberlain in the imperial court. Otherwise several men of similar standing could conceivably have impersonated Alexander among the gullible people of a remote part of Russia.
94
Feodor Kuzmich died in 1864 by which time, were he really Alexander, he would have been eighty-five. This is another reason why, at a time when the average life expectancy was shorter than that of today, it is unlikely that they were one and the same. Two years later, however, speculation over the tsar’s death was further intensified when, on two separate occasions, his tomb was opened and found to be empty inside.
It is feasible that the tsar’s body was removed by his nephew, Alexander II, and buried secretly in the graveyard of the Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg. If so he may have honoured the known wishes of his uncle, who had hated the thought of burial in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul, beside the father he felt he had murdered. Should this have happened Alexander must now lie beside the warrior prince whose exploits, during his lifetime, he had greatly revered.
The enigmatic figure of Sir James Wylie, Tsar Alexander’s personal doctor, the one man who knew for certain of the manner of his death, was among those who mourned at his funeral in March 1826. Distinguished by his height, he stood, black-garbed, with bowed head, as the coffin containing the body of the man he had known, served and loved, was placed beside that of his father in the monastery of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul on that day in March 1826.
What secret was Wylie hiding? For the lack of further evidence no one now will ever know. At the time his sorrow was evident, compounded, so the watchers believed, by his known failure to have forced the tsar to agree to the treatment which may conceivably have saved his life. Secretive as ever, Wylie imparted his knowledge to no one. Turning away from the grave, he left the church a sad and isolated man.
It is from Doctor Robert Lee’s diary that the impression arises of the state of political tension in Russia following the Decembrist Rising of December 1825. People lived constantly in fear, afraid that even their most private conversations would be overheard and taken as reason for arrest.
Lee also gives vivid descriptions of the country itself at that time. Leaving Taganrog on 10 January 1826 (the day after the funeral procession had set off for St Petersburg), he travelled with Count Vorontsov to Odessa through the worst of the Russian winter. The temperature frequently fell to below 168 Fahrenheit and the wind howled with the full force of a hurricane from Siberia over the vast plains down to the south of the Ukraine.
So intense was the cold that Lee had kept himself occupied in Taganrog by carrying out an anatomical examination of the victims of hypothermia brought in from the steppes to the town. Reaching Odessa he found the general consensus to be that the nation had been saved from revolution by the courage and decision of Emperor Nicholas on the fateful day of 14 December.
Lee was deeply distressed, however, to find that some of the greatest friends he had made during his time in Russia had been proved to be involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the emperor and the government. Foremost among these was General Michael Orloff, a hero of the war against France. Lee had been his guest in his house in Kiev as recently as the previous June. Orloff’s wife was both beautiful and intelligent and their household a particularly happy one.
The general, a most perfect host, had taken him on a tour of places of interest, including the catacombs, dug out of the rock, which contained the bodies of more than 100 bishops, saints and historians. However, in private he had confessed to his loathing of the treatment of slaves and of the corrupt state of the government. Nonetheless, absorbed as he was in the study of political economy and sciences, he had given no hint of being in any way involved in a plot to raise a rebellion, let alone to destroy the royal family.
Now charged with treason, this intellectual, civilized man, for whom Lee had such respect and affection, was incarcerated in the dungeon of the fortress in St Petersburg, renowned, as Lee knew, for the dreadful acts of bestial cruelty which took place within its walls.
Another prisoner, the Polish Count Olizar, so recently a guest of Count Vorontsov in the Crimea and known to be in very poor health, was fortunately soon liberated. Not so Prince Serge Volkonsky, who was held without trial, had his sword broken over his head, and, stripped of his rank and honours, was banished to the wilds of Siberia reduced to the rank of a slave.
Due to the unrest in Russia following Alexander’s death, Count Vorontsov found it necessary to travel to St Petersburg despite the still freezing weather of the early spring. Together with his doctor he set off from Odessa to begin the long journey from the south to the north on 15 March. Travelling on, at first over the steppes and then through vast areas of forest, they finally reached the capital after nearly four weeks, on 11 April.
Lee, describing how they entered the city about midday, wrote:
I was struck with astonishment at the grandeur of the quays, palaces, public buildings and the bridges of granite over the canals . . . Streets paved, the greatest cleanliness, and crowds of people moving about in every direction. I could not help contrasting this with the miserable villages and people I had left behind in White Russia.
After dinner I went with Colonel A. Rajewsky to take a sail on the Neva. He told me that 250 persons were implicated in the conspiracy . . . We sailed under the Bridge of St Isaac to the Bourse, and from the point on which it stands saw at one view the fortress with all the buildings above it, and on the right the line of palaces and houses upon the quay. The sun was just setting and its rays were beautifully reflected from the broad stream of the Neva, and from the windows of the palaces along its shore.
Soon Colonel Rajewsky was to confide in Lee the details of what had been intended by those involved in the intrigue to overthrow the regime. A constitutional government was to be established along the lines of that in America. The serfs were to be freed; the imperial family destroyed. Lee went with the colonel to visit his sister, the lovely Princess Volkonsky, and found her, as he put it, ‘overwhelmed with grief’. She had no idea what would happen to her husband, whether his life would even be spared.
On 28 April, Mr Landers, brother-in-law of the British Consul in Odessa, arrived in St Petersburg. He brought the news that it was now thought to be inevitable that Russia and Turkey would soon be at war once again.
The crisis had been initiated by Tsar Nicholas demanding the ratification of the Treaty of Bucharest, which had been signed by old General Kutuzov and ratified by Alexander on 28 May 1812, the day before Napoleon invaded Russia. The agreement had ended the conflict between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, which had lasted for six years since 1806. Under its terms the Prut River had become the border between the two empires, thus leaving Bessarabia under Russian rule. Russia had also gained the valuable trading rights on the Danube. The Turks, naturally resentful, now wished to reassert their claims.
Troops were being marshalled and the Russian navy under Admiral Greig was preparing for action at sea. Sir James Wylie, head of the army medical department, was ordered to prepare for war. Then suddenly, and surprisingly, the Turkish government, initially so hostile, agreed to the new tsar’s terms.
Doctor Lee, who saw Wylie at this moment, claimed he was visibly disappointed. This surprising remark, in view of Wylie’s known hatred of the inevitable carnage of war, leads one to believe that, relieved as he must have been that further wide-scale slaughter had been avoided, he was frustrated by the anti-climax of the peace, which had rendered all his preparations useless after weeks of pressurized activity, exhausting to a man of his age.
Lee, in fact, went to the Artillery Hospital and found the wards ‘in excellent order’. He was told that the term ‘cardiopalmus’, invented by Wylie to describe palpitations, was now applied to all the diseases of the heart and great blood vessels ‘which I was told are extremely common in the officers and soldiers of the Russian army’.
95
Wylie had recently published in Russian his
Practical Remarks on the Plague
, which appeared in print at the same time as his translation from the English of James Johnson’s influential book on
The Influence of Tropical Climate on European Constitutions.
On 3 May Lee dined with a wealthy English merchant. Among the guests was a Mrs P (presumably an English woman), who had known Tsar Alexander and been a close friend of Elizabeth’s. She told him that the empress had left Taganrog and had managed the first part of the journey tolerably well. There was some anxiety about her health, however, for her feet were swelling and it was feared she had water on the lungs, which appeared to be hereditary as several of her family had died ‘of water on the chest’.
Elizabeth had, thankfully, escaped the funeral service and everything that it involved. Too ill to travel with the funeral cortège in January, she had stayed at Taganrog until the snow melted on the steppes to the north. Then she had begun the journey, with her own physician Doctor Stoffregen and her ladies-in-waiting in attendance. Travelling in stages of only fifty miles a day, she was nonetheless exhausted and painfully breathless. On the evening of 15 May she stopped at Belev where, early the next morning, her maid found her dead in bed.
Elizabeth’s funeral took place on 14 June 1826. Rumours were circulating that anonymous letters had been sent to Tsar Nicholas, warning him of a probable attempt at assassination. Subsequently, Nicholas and his Etat-Major reviewed the troops at a gallop, saluting each regiment as he passed before the funeral began.
The great concourse of people who came to pay their last respects included many tradespeople, draped in black and carrying black flags, and girls belonging to the different schools which Elizabeth had patronized. Lancers and a long company of priests walked in the procession, which followed the funeral carriage drawn by eight grey horses. At the head, the new emperor and empress and generals and officers preceded a long line of cavalry and horse artillery. There was no music, only the sombre crash of guns fired every minute from the fortress of St Peter and St Paul.
Conspicuous among those attending the funeral was a man who stood almost a head taller than most of the surrounding crowd. Although now nearly sixty, Sir James Wylie was still a distinguished figure, his back erect, his hair turning grey. No one present regretted Elizabeth’s passing more than he. His thoughts must have rested on the time when, as a young man of thirty, he had first entered the royal household when Elizabeth, the fair-haired princess from Baden, with the beauty of a fragile flower, had been only twenty-four.
How well he remembered his pity for her as he had seen her humiliated by Alexander’s parents, dominated by his imperious mother and terrorized by his father’s sarcasm and fits of uncontrollable rage. He had witnessed her sadness at the deaths of their two little daughters, one only a baby, the other just a year old. Wylie had watched them both suffer and witnessed, to his sorrow, how Alexander had found solace with his mistress while Elizabeth retired, almost to obscurity. Afterwards, it had seemed miraculously, he had seen Alexander turn to Elizabeth, inspired by her faith in religion, after the disasters of Borodino and the fall of Moscow had sent him almost insane.
As witness to their married life together, Wylie knew, as did few others, that Alexander, unfaithful as he had been, had really loved only Elizabeth, the frail and near ethereal beauty chosen for him by his grandmother when he was only fifteen. He also knew that Elizabeth, admired as she had been by others, including Prince Adam Czartoryski, her husband’s friend and confidant, had never loved anyone but Alexander, without whom the world had no pleasure for her. Crowding out times of unhappiness was the image of those halcyon days at Taganrog before the onset of his fatal disease. Alexander’s death had clouded her existence. He alone had been her sun.
Doctor Lee describes in his journal how, following the empress’s funeral, the city of St Petersburg remained in mourning, the carriages draped with black cloth. He called on Sir James Wylie, who had just received a letter from the empress’s personal physician, Doctor Stoffregen, describing his own great sorrow at her death.
He also gave the results of the post mortem, which confirmed Wylie’s own diagnosis of the causes relating to her death. Elizabeth’s lungs had been found to be sound but her heart was badly diseased. Wylie knew, however, as did Stoffregen himself, that for all her poor physical condition, Elizabeth, without Alexander, had simply not wanted to live.
On the day after Elizabeth’s funeral Doctor Lee left St Petersburg. A cold north wind was blowing, setting up clouds of dust. Setting off for Moscow at two o’clock in the afternoon, he was accompanied by General and Madame Naryshkin, she who as Alexander’s long-time mistress had caused such grief to his wife. In addition to this strangely assorted party there travelled a Mr Artemieff.