A heart-to-heart conversations with the Tsesarevich Alexei

It was pure pleasure to see him wield an ax when he was chopping wood. We thought it took half a lifetime to learn how to do that so well. He taught us how to chop wood, too, so we wouldn’t injure ourselves. He told us how Russian warriors knew how to defend themselves with an ax, switching it from hand to hand. He even tried to teach us how to throw an ax. At school there was a military office where they kept small – gauge rifles. He taught us how to shoot with them: how to hold the butt and press it to your cheek, how to lower the trigger while you hold your breath, and how to aim.

He had a reasonable attitude toward food. He loved fish, cocoa, wine, and champagne. I remember, when we were children, sitting down at the table and each of us being given a starched napkin. There was a soup tureen on the table and everything was very formal. We were not allowed to pick up our spoon first. For that you could get a smack on the forehead. When he taught us to sit at the table and use a fork and knife, and what the table setting should be, my mother would say: “There you are again with your silly White Guard ways. I just hope to God no one finds out.” When we got older, all this came to an end. The china disappeared, and we started eating like everyone else. Any information was passed on to us before a specific age. Evidently, he felt that this ability [to be well mannered] no longer had any application.

I think that he knew and experienced enough to fill several books and films. He used to say that all you had to do was read My Universities and Journey among the People by Maxim Gorky to know what his youth had been like. When I read How the Steel Was Tempered, I asked, “Papa, was it you who was Nikolai Ostrovsky?” He smiled and answered, “No, I wasn’t Nikolai Ostrovsky. Anyway I had a worse fate than he did.” My father often told us how he traveled around in his childhood. As an example he cited Mark Twain’s book about Tom Sawyer, and he liked Jack London, too. He watched films about the war and intelligence agents very attentively. He noticed what demeanor one needed to have and how one needed to educate oneself to say nothing extra. He liked certain sayings: “My tongue is my enemy” and “We were given a tongue to hide our thoughts.” I don’t know where he got this kind of information, but he would tell us that the Germans had a spy school where they studied Orthodoxy and divine law. Then they were dropped into Russia. According to him, these people were caught once at the railroad station in Tyumen when they tried to poison the food and sprinkle poison in the milk cans.

We lived in a German – Dutch settlement founded during the days of Catherine II in the Novosergievsky District of Orenburg Province. The settlement had an unusual name: Pretoria. It was either Holland or Germany in miniature – with its windmills, cheese factory, and particular way of life. The houses were made out of huge boulders, the large roofs and doors out of thick wood. If you pulled on a rope, half of the door would open – the carved, wooden half. And everything was always left unlocked. No one ever stole anything. It was tidy. My father worked there as a geography teacher at the high school and was always highly regarded. His pupils loved and respected him. Many people knew him in the town and the province as well. He was a sociable man and was also involved in civic activities – he was a deputy.

He was always comfortable with people of other nationalities. He never taught us to treat them in any special way. He said that one had to study another person’s experience in order to learn how to live better. He called upon us to be tolerant. He did not recognize Baptists or sectarians. In his understanding, they created a superfluous background, not being a major spiritual movement in religion like Orthodoxy. He remembered prayers and created them for himself. He said that by age fourteen he knew them all by heart.

Our family’s life was spent in villages removed from large cities and communications, so our only connection with the world was the radio, and later, in the 1960s, the television.

Holidays had a special significance for the family, because they bonded the family, creating warmth, coziness, and a special mood. We children always looked forward to them, especially New Year’s, birthdays, and so on. The New Year always had special meaning for our family. Mama and Papa tried to make us part of the general preparations not only at school, where they were always the leaders, taking part in the amateur theatrics. Mama organized carnivals, sewed costumes, embroidering them with beads by herself and with our help.

Father read by heart: poetry, Koltsov; Lermontov, Pushkin; Krylov’s fables. And he liked reciting the works of Anton Chekhov, like “Boots”, “The Boor,” “The Horsy Name, “Lady with the Lapdog,” “Nasty Boy,” and “Surveyor,” and Kuprin’s “The Duel.”

Mama sang love songs, accompanying herself on the guitar. At home, we put on plays, learning the roles for the fairy tale “Kolobok,” “The Tale of the Golden Fish,” “Filipka, “Tom Thumb,” “Speckled Hen,” “Nasty Boy, and so on.

The school in the village of Pretoria was a wooden structure dating to 1905, with a large assembly hall, where we would put a 30 – foot tree and the teachers would gather around it with their children. Children of various ages waltzed with their parents. I always wore a large bow tie and I liked to dance. Father liked to dance, but only the slow tango. We had a teachers’ choir, in which my parents sang. The director was Turnov Alexander Alexandrovich, the music teacher.

At home, my parents also set up a tree, which we kept up for two weeks starting December 30. My parents and sisters and I made toys from paper, ships, crackers, we glued and drew pictures, we liked to illustrate scenes about the boy from “Snow Queen,” how he suffered and searched for his sister. We also had glass ornaments for the tree. We set the tree on a crisscross stand or in a box with sand. Papa helped us embroider kerchiefs with themes from nature or from stories like “Kolobok” and “Inchman,” the little man who lived in a music box.

Mama and Papa put presents under the pillows on birthdays, but for New Year’s they would dress up as the Snow Maiden and Grandfather Frost, take our presents out from under the tree and congratulate us, and we would give them our gifts, sing a song about the tree, and dance around it.

Papa often recalled how he celebrated New Year’s as a child. “But back then,” he said, “It was different. We also had Christmas, and that was a big family holiday.” We would ask, “What was that holiday and why don’t we have it now?” He would reply evasively and say that it was hard to talk about it now. We did not have a church in the village, but he would mark the occasion by recalling his life and talking about the “old” New Year’s, because after the Revolution all the dates were changed and people went to church then, but we lived in a German – Dutch village and the locals had their own holiday, which father did not recognize and said that it was a holiday based on a different calendar.

At New Year’s some residents went to Baptist prayer houses; some dressed up and visited friends.

My father’s birthday was around that period, and he always said that the certificate he was given in the 1930s indicated that he was born December 22, 1908, but he counted and figured that in the new style [the Gregorian Calendar] it was January 4; but he told Mother that it was January 28, and she asked him, “So which is your birthday?” and he would say that it was all mixed up.

We never had guests for his birthday. We celebrated it in the family He recalled his parents, who died early in life. We wrote him cards, made

drawings, gave him books on chess, fishing, hunting, and history, and embroidered hankies for him. Unfortunately, because we moved often, it was all lost, even though Mama often exhibited her work at school, where she ran the sewing club, and in regional shows, as were our drawings, especially the ones I did with Father, for the holidays. I don’t know what could be found of that now. In connection with Christmas Father often talked about “Christ’s egg” and the suffering of Christ at the hands of bad people. He told us about how the first holiday trees appeared in Russia, about how the holidays were celebrated by the Slavs in ancient pagan times and later, starting with the Russian tsars until Peter the Great, and how he traveled around Russia, a “wandering beggar,” and said that he had to keep in his memory everything that happened to him. And he told us that the Russian tsars loved to hunt in those days. He told us that there was a fast before Christmas, that people prepared themselves for the feast day, and that he used to be like that, he observed Advent, but now few people remember it.

On holidays Kagor wine was served, which my father always called “church wine.” Mama made pies filled with cabbage and with berries, jellied fish, and roast goose or suckling pig. (Father often told us that as a child he and his father “at night” cooked goose “African style,” cooking it without removing the feathers, in day in a bonfire, and that the feathers came off when you removed the day. They also cooked pheasant and quail that way.) Our family loved desserts, we children had cakes, and our parents drank champagne.

We children spent the holidays outside, making snowmen, playing with snowballs, building fortresses out of snow. I spent my whole childhood far from cities, and came to know large cities only later.

In school we studied the history of Russia and the history of the Party. Everyone knows what kind of sciences these were. For him, history was a favorite subject, the basis of his children`s upbringing. He believed that all the misfortunes in Russia were due to a lack of upbringing and education, that this was the greatest of shortcomings and led to misunderstandings, incomprehension, and a reluctance to penetrate to the essence of events, and, in the final analysis, to wars. He used to say that to know history we must read not only textbooks but other books as well. For example, we needed to read about Emelian Pugachev, Suvorov, Catherine II, and Peter I and know much more about them than we got in school. We would ask him whether he knew the history of his own family. And he would tell us how his people grew up on the river Uvod in Kostroma, where his ancestors lived in wooden huts and hunted and fished. “They always hunted with dogs. You must never beat dogs. If, God forbid, anything happened and you offended it, it could betray you during a hunt.” He told us about some distant ancestor of his who went hunting for bear in the winter, but his dogs abandoned him in the forest because he had beaten one of them. The bear was full, of course, and only laid the hunter low with a fallen branch. When the hunter came to, he shot the dogs. “But,” he said, “my people also went after bears without guns. They made an iron ball with spikes and threw it at the bear. He caught it with his paws and the spikes cut into them. Then they had to ride up to him and slit open his belly. That was their idea of entertainment.” (My father was a marvelous marksman and loved to hunt. He used to say that in the old days he had had a dog, a rust – colored Russian hound.) He used to say that all his ancestors were very blond and very fair – haired. “And our name,” he said, “came from Filaret. Once there was a man named Filaret, and we are descended from him.” Today I understand why he said this. “Filaret” comes from the Greek, filat. Later, when we were attempting to sort out his allegories, we asked, “So does that mean that you are the boy who was rescued during the execution of the Romanov family?” And he answered: “Of course not, I descend from Filaret.”

I learned from my father about the execution of the tsar’s family for the first time in about the seventh grade, when we began going through the history of the Revolution. That was when I first heard the name of Yurovsky, who, as my father said, organized the entire affair. I could not understand how the boy could have lived (in his stories, he spoke about the tsarevich only in the third person and called him “the boy”). He used to say that this boy saw the entire crime and what happened afterward and that they hunted for him all the rest of his life. I asked him, “So where did he hide?” And he said: “Under a bridge. There was a bridge there at the crossing, and he crawled in there when the truck shook.” “But how do you know this?” He fell silent. “My uncles told me.” “But who are these uncles?” “Uncle Sasha Strekotin and Uncle Andrei Strekotin, who were in the house guard. After the front, they were stationed there. Oh, and also Uncle Misha.”

(According to the reminiscences of our father, it was during this reloading that Alexei hid under the bridge near the railroad, and, after the truck left, moved along the right-of-way, reaching Shartash Station by dawn. But in Ekaterinburg was more than one bridge near crossing number 184 where the truck could have become stuck in the mud and required unloading.

From the Ipatiev house, two routes led through, or past, the Upper Isetsk works to the Koptyaki road. The first went over the dam at the town pond, a guarded site where a truck on a secret mission would not have wanted to go. But a block downstream on the Iset River, which turned into a brook right below the dam, was a small bridge and next to that, the machine shop rail branch, which led to the Rezhevsky plant. It was about two-and-a-half miles from here to the Shartash Station. Alexei could have covered this distance in two hours in the dark. The search party did not go in that direction and could not have found him.

The other route went from the Ipatiev house on Ascension Avenue to North Street, left over the bridge across another brook, past the new and old stations, past the Upper Isetsk plant, and out onto the Koptyaki road. The truck could have become stuck at this bridge, too. Once again, alongside it was the railroad right-of-way, which continued for about three miles to Shartash Station. Alexei could have covered this distance in two hours as well.

According to the reminiscences of father, on the morning of July 17, the Strekotin “uncles” found Alexei at Shartash Station, and drove him 140 miles to Shadrinsk. The road to Shadrinsk – the terminus of what was at the time a blind branch of the Ekaterinburg-Sinarskaya-Shadrinsk line – was still open. Voitsekhovsky and Gaida’s shock troops were moving toward Ekaterinburg from Chelyabinsk in the south and from Kuzino Station in the west. Easterly directions – toward Tyumen and Shadrinsk – were still open during the week of July 17—24. Alexei reached Shadrinsk with an escort during that week).

He also used to tell me how the bodies of the executed were thrown into tiny mine shafts. “If you want to see how it all was, go watch the movie The Young Guard. There you’ll see large mine shafts, like in Alapaevsk, but you’ll have a notion of those events.” To my question of why I would care about that, he replied: “Why do you need a reason? You’ll know history.” I went to those movies and all my life I remembered the mine shafts the people were thrown down in the film. About the grave he said that he remembered the place, where it was. And that there were no traces left.

It was not until later that I began asking myself how this could be, if this were a boy, a chance witness of a certain episode, he could easily have lost control and cried out or given himself away somehow. In order really to know everything from the beginning (Tobolsk and the Ipatiev house) to the end (the burial site), he had to have passed through the entire chain of events. Could there have been several boys? All of them would have had to have a diseased left foot. How many such boys with a sick foot (specifically a left foot) could end up in the same place at the same time so that one of them saw the execution, another the road along which the bodies were transported, and so on. Which means there was one boy? In addition, there was nowhere to read about the details he told us at that time. This was not publicized or popularized in the official press, and there was no such thing as reading something on the topic in the library, which is why this stuck in my memory especially. He used to talk about these events when the conversation turned to tsars and history, and this was embedded in our memory. My father did not often return to these stories (it would drive anyone crazy to talk about this all the time). He raised us very competently and sensibly, stage by stage, step by step. He spoke about what had happened to him cautiously, so that his story would stay in our memory like little specks. He did not tell us very much about the Revolution. He did say that they broke up and smashed everything, murdered people, and destroyed everything the Russian people had created, because they had lost their faith in God.

My father used to say that the Strekotins were very fond of this boy. They used to talk to him through the fence and exchanged handkerchiefs and other small objects with him. They came from working – class families – ordinary Red Army soldiers from the Orenburg front. One of the Strekotins, Andrei, perished on the Iset River during Bliukher and Kashirin’s retreat to Perm on July 18, 1918. As my father said, Uncle Sasha Strekotin used to tell the story of how on that day Andrei had had a premonition and had said: “Melancholy is swallowing me up. They’ll kill me today, Sasha.” And no sooner had they said goodbye to one another than that is what happened. He raised his head too high out of the trench and a stray bullet struck him right in the forehead. I would ask my father how the Strekotins vich. According to him, they fled with Bliukher into the forest, where everyone forgot about them.

Under the command of the famous civil war hero Kashirin, the brigade left Ekaterinburg on July 18, 1918, and got as far as Perm. On August 12, 1918, Bliukher had joined up with Kashirin and was his second in command. I often wonder about another coincidence: in our village there were some Kashirins who looked after us in our childhood. For the most part their family lived in the next village, but they would come to see my father and help him out. In talking about the Strekotins’ participation in rescuing the tsarevich, my father made it very clear that they were aided by tsarist intelligence. And indeed, as of April 1918, the Academy of the General Staff had been transferred to Ekaterinburg. Many of the officers who studied there had already been through the war and, naturally, regardless of whether the boy was called Alexei Romanov or Vasily Filatov, there was no need to prove anything to them because they simply knew him by face. According to my father, in Ekaterinburg information was exchanged with the help of semaphores, which were done from the attic using a candle, which they turned “on” and “off” with their hand. By the way, my father taught us Morse code. He said that the most important thing in this alphabet, as in music and semaphore, was the concept of the pause, and that Morse code had been widely introduced in Russia and the tsar’s ships had started using it. He did not tell us about the people he communicated with in this way, but he did show us several photographs. I remember he always loved films about secret agents, and when we watched them with him, he always drew our attention to their knowledge and restraint, which was essential to possess in order not to say an unnecessary word.

The further story of the rescue is this. With the help of several workers, Mikhail Pavlovich Gladkikh (Uncle Misha) took the “boy” to Shartash Station and from there to Shadrinsk. They brought him to the Filatov family, who laid him down next to their ailing son Vasily, who was approximately the same age as the “boy.” After a while Vasily died of fever or, as they said at the time, the Spanish flu. Thus my father became Vasily Filatov. They established his age by looking at his teeth, and later they found a birth certificate, and everything fell into place and matched up quite logically. Thus, in 1933, at the Road Building Workers’ School where he was studying, he was asked whether he had been deprived of his voting rights. In the reply it says he hadn’t and was the son of a shoemaker. [If one was considered a White, or a member of the bourgeois classes, the Soviets would revoke his or her right to vote.] For a man with this kind of legend, everything had to match up. Of course, the people who helped save him and who worked out the legend by which he lived his life had to have been relatively well educated.

At the time [of the rescue], Shadrinsk was an important center in Perm Province. They treated many wounded in these places, taking advantage of the local medicinal springs. My father used to say that he was rendered his first medical assistance at Shartash Station. After he was given his new name, they took him to Surgut, where they treated him for loss of blood. Naturally, this could be done only by people who knew in detail both his illness and the methods for treating it, considering the local natural conditions. After all, the boy was very sick. These people had to have known beforehand where to take him, where they would be able to help him using traditional and folk medicine and to provide him with a devoted and experienced physician. In those regions there were many folk healers, and my father put great faith in them. I remember when we were living in the Urals he would travel to the next settlement of Kichkas to a healer and study with her. She taught him to gather broken human bones. She would smash a clay pot, sprinkle the broken pieces into a sack, and make the person gather them by touch. At the river, my father searched for clay for mud baths and treated himself. The healer helped him do this. AH his life, my father was good at identifying herbs and used them for his treatment. He used to tell us that he had learned this from northern peoples, when he was living in Surgut. The Khanty-Mansy and Nenets tribes had taught him this. It is a wellknown fact that they have methods for stanching blood, as they are constantly battling scurvy.

With the assistance of Archpriest Golovkin, we are able to obtain from the Russian State Archives a copy of the autobiography of Vladimir Nikolaevich Derevenko, the tsar’s family physician. We know from Derevenko’s autobiography and work by contemporary researchers that shortly before the execution; a General Ivan Ivanovich Sidorov arrived from Odessa to contact the tsar’s family (evidently an emissary from Nicholas II’s mother, Marie Feodorovna Romanova). He made contact with Derevenko, who was also in Ekaterinburg at that time but living not in the Ipatiev house, together with everyone else, but separately, at liberty, and he was allowed to visit the tsar’s family regularly to examine the tsarevich. In Nikolai Ros’s book The Death of the Tsar’s Family, which was published in Frankfurt in 1987, I read that in one instance Nicholas II asked Dr. Derevenko to take out of the Ipatiev house the most precious thing they had, Rasputin’s letters, and that Derevenko managed to get them past the guard. I think that this can serve as confirmation that it was he, a man devoted to the tsar’s family to the end, as well as a physician intimately familiar with the boy’s ailments and the means for helping him, who was involved in his rescue.

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