Noble Blood - The Stories of the Tsar Monk

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

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.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Merch!— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school.

Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They hit a bogo. Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. It was a cold September day in 1836 when the police arrested an enigmatic newcomer to the remote Russian town of Krasnufansk. The man looked to be about 50-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 horse of the purest white. Outside the Krasnufimsk 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 only said that his name was Fyodor Kuzmich. 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 past, penalty of 20 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 43rd exile settlement at Bogotolsk. He was sentenced to labor at a vodka distillery, but within a few months, the director meekly said that Fyodor Kuzmich didn't need to work anymore. No one quite knew why. Rumors flew on the streets of Krasnufimsk, quickly spreading along the winding roads of Russia as winter settled in. There was no way this mysterious stranger was just some person. 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 I, returned home. My dear father, Fyodor Kuzmich, she said, you look exactly like Nickylus. Nicholas's brother, the former Tsar Alexander I. But that was impossible. Tsar Alexander I had died 11 years earlier. The holy man went white. Then the normally good-natured Kuzmich raised his voice in shocking anger. Why would you say 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 Kuzmich actually Alexander the first, 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 I had been the cherished grandson of Catherine the Great. He was a handsome 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. a hearty, healthy man all his life, until he died suddenly in 1825 at the age of 47.

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 Tsar had been becoming more religious for years. He was wracked with guilt over the assassination of his father, which had brought him to the throne. He spoke of wanting to abdicate by the time he hit 50, and then at 47, death by mysterious illness. And later, in 1836, 11 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 44 million subjects. To pull off a scheme like that, it would take someone with absolutely. absolute power, immense motivating guilt, and an iron will. In other words, someone exactly like the 47-year-old Alexander I. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. The future czar Alexander Pavlovich was born on December 23, 1777, in St. Petersburg, during the reign of his famous grandmother, Catherine 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, Catherine's son, Paul. But it was not to be. Catherine died in 1796 when Alexander was 18 and his father Paul took over as emperor. He was as unpopular as ever. everyone had expected. Tsar Paul the first was despotic and censorious, punishing people for every minor infraction against whatever random rule he had decided on, 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 47 or not. Alexander rose to the Russian throne in 1801, a handsome, a handsome, 23-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 constitutional

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 surf 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 strange. 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 1820s,

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 1824, his illegitimate daughter, Sophie, died of tuberculosis at only 18 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. 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 1825, Alexander was 47 and his wife Elizabeth was 46. Elizabeth became ill, and Alex became single-mindedly obsessed with her health. She could not stay in the cold capital of St. 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 Tsar Alexander's Sphinx-like character. The 40-something man suddenly became so devoted to a wife that he had spent the past 30 years basically indifferent to. They'd gotten married when he was 15 and she was 14, 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, 47 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 St. 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 Tagan Rock, 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 1825, he kissed his mother goodbye and set off for Tagan Rock, 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 1400-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 Ganrog. 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 mother. 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 attendance, 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 of 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 Taganruk, and after that, she stopped. So all we know is that on December 1, 1825, Tsar Alexander I of Russia died. Whether the man himself died or merely his identity as Tsar is a different question. The autopsy, as reported to us by history, did not commence for 36,000. 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 putrefied 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 Kuzmich 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 Starts, a Russian holy man, a word that sounds to English ears, pardon my pronunciation, but when correctly pronounced, sounds incredibly close to Tsar. Fyodor Kuzmich gained a following as a good religious man,

and even in his lifetime, people suspected that he was secretly Tsar Alexander I, 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 I. But more strange rumors abounded him. Once, he was visited by a young man whom observers took to be Nicholas I's son, Alexander II, 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 I spoke to Napoleon. According to the family's daughter's diary, a voice rang out from Fyodor Kuzmich's quarters,

I never said that, the voice said. Whoever he really was, Fyodor Kuzmich died in 1864. If he was Alexander in disguise, he would have been 87 years old. On his deathbed, Fyodor was asked one final time, Who are you? Really? And just as he had done when he was first questioned by police, nearly 30 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 Kuzmich 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 I. This podcast has done several episodes about pretenders to the throne. But Fyodor Kuzmich was different.

He wasn't claiming to be the Tsar. If there was any pretending going on, it wasn't pretending. to be the emperor, it was pretending not to be. But how could Tsar Alexander have pulled off the switcheroo? If he didn't really die in Taganrog at the age of 47, how could he have faked his own death, kept it a secret, disappeared for 11 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 coffin 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 11 years before reappearing as Fyodor Kuzmich 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 11 years in the kind of mystical pious and unbothered seclusion that he had wanted so desperately as Tsar? 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 1800s 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 Trebetskoi, 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. Trebetskoy died in 2017, never knowing the answer, unfortunately.

DNA analysis has been promised but never yet performed. But the pure strain of his belief, the boy-like 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 47-year-old suddenly died

during a historical period when no one questioned the death of his daughter at 18, or the extreme illness of his wife the same age as him. Fyodor Kuzmich 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? Zaharrow. Zah, Are Alexander III, our Alexander's great nephew, supposedly hung a portrait of Fyodor Kuzmich alongside a portrait of Alexander I. Alexis Trebetskoy swears that the sister of Tsar Nicholas II personally told him that her family had no doubt that Alexander and Fyodor were the same man. Leo Tolstoy wrote an unfinished story from the perspective of Fyodor Kuzmich 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 Fyodor Kuzmich was the Tsar. If Alexander was still living for another 40 years, it would have thrown the entire reign of Nicholas I into question, and then the reign of his son Alexander II, who became Tsar while Fyodor Kuzmich was still alive.

In 2015, the president of the Russian graphicalogical society, a handwriting expert, compared the writing of the Tsar and the monk. And she came to a stunning conclusion. The Emperor Alexander I and Fyodor Kuzmich, she said, were one and the same man. So, who knows? I think maybe I just convinced myself.

That's the story of Alexander I 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 Kuzmich might have been. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary.

Reduff in here and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. Video on demand. This guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m. Whatever time it is. Lizzie McGuire and I'm like... Wild. A wild batch you were with. It was like a first like closet moment from me where I was like... You're like, I don't feel like she's hot. Like the rest of them. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like...

But listen to Los Coleristas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire 2am, video on demand. This guy's bo-oo-a-m-m-a-m-m-awr.

Lissie McGuire. And I'm like, a wild batch you were with. It was like a first, like, closet moment from me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way

than these boys are. I'm not like, duh. Listen to Los Coltristas on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. Whatever Fyodor Kuzmage was, he was almost certainly not low-born. Whether or not he was the czar Alexander I in disguise, he was probably covering up someone that he had been in a past life, probably a nobleman. But who?

One option is a nobleman named Fyodor Uvarov, a cavalry of. officer in the Russian wars against Napoleon, which would explain the monk's knowledge of the war. Fyodor Uvarov disappeared without a trace in 1827, along with all-known portraits of him. Police always suspected that his 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 Kuzmich was Alexander's own half-brother, Simeon, the illegitimate son of Paul I. Fyodor Kuzmich 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 Kuzmich.

Simeon, the half-brother, supposedly died at sea, but there are no naval records of his death. If he reappeared as the monk, then Fyodor Kuzmich would have been Alexander's half-brother, which would explain his noble bearing and his undeniable resemblance to the enigmatic lost czar. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah John. Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il Kali,

with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. and IHeart podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey.

And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?

Oh, they hit a bogo. Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-heart podcast, guaranteed human.