A heart-to-heart conversations with the Tsesarevich Alexei. Oleg Filatov
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questions but simply believed him. How can you not believe your own father when you see him suffering and realize that his life might have turned out very differently?
I may have to repeat myself in this account, but there is nothing so terrible in that. What is most important is to be honest. This is the basic principle: to tell the truth no matter what it is. Of course, the archives might suggest a great deal, both the closed and the open archives, to which we do not have access due to several circumstances – partly a lack of money and partly the bureaucracy and the fear that lives on in people. But if we don’t read this page, which obliges all of us to prevent a repetition of something similar, we will never find out how the history of our state might have taken shape had there not been a revolution. If we are talking about repentance, then we still have to sort out who committed the murder of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas П, and why to this day none of the country’s leaders and none of the forensic medical experts or attorneys has proposed a standard version of those events of July 1918, or of how the lives of the people who participated in this Ekaterinburg tragedy turned out.
My father told us almost nothing about his parents. When we would ask where the photographs of our grandmothers and grandfathers were, he would reply: “There aren’t any, everything was lost.” There was nothing surprising in that. There had been a civil war and everything burned up and was lost. But when we began questioning him, he would fall silent. All he said about his own father was that he had been a soldier all his life that he went on his final march of sixty kilometers [almost forty miles], drank some cold water from a well, came down with consumption, and died in 1921. About his mother he said that she was a schoolteacher and taught language and music and was shot as a Left Socialist Revolutionary when he was still a boy. He also used to say that he had relatives but he didn’t know them because they abandoned him in Sukhumi when they went abroad during the civil war. When my mother occasionally asked him in a fit of temper, “Here you are saying that we are doing everything wrong, but where are your relatives?” he would shut down, move off, and stop talking. By the way, he could say nothing for long periods of time – go several days or a month without talking. On the other hand, he was sometimes like a child, especially on days when his health was bad. He would just look in silence. He was mulling over something privately, but there was no sadness in his eyes.
In discussing my father s destiny, I have to say that he possessed exceptional abilities and extensive connections. Recalling him, I come to the conclusion that this man was obviously not who he made himself out to be. Officially, he came from the family of a soldier who due to disability became a shoemaker, a man who went to church school as a child, became homeless as a child, and later became a teacher. Today I reconstruct my reminiscences of him from my own childhood and come to the conclusion that this story is not true and that many of his actions were conditioned by his education, sufferings, and illness.
My father had an extremely broad outlook and a thoroughgoing knowledge of life, history, geography, politics, and economics. He knew the traditions of his own country and other states well. He had mastered foreign languages – German, Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Latin, English, and French – although he did not use them actively. He explained his knowledge of languages and his excel1 lent motor and visual memory by saying that he had always striven to be a harmoniously developed person. He used to tell us: “You are as many times a man as the number of languages you know.” He meant that if you know the language, culture, traditions, and customs of a people who live in some other world, you expand your own possibilities. He read with amazing speed and in great quantities, remembering what he had read very easily. You got the impression that he was extracting information like an automaton. He could recite from memory the poetry of Fet, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Esenin, Chekhov, Kuprin, Heinrich Heine, and Goethe in German. He loved Goethe’s Faust. He explained this by saying that in their family they used to gather in the evenings and read aloud to one another: plays, poems, novellas, and novels in Russian and foreign languages. In this way, the family bonded, relaxed, and conversed.
My father had a great enthusiasm for history, especially military history, and knew it thoroughly, including the troop dislocations and the alignments of forces in specific battles. In demonstrating his knowledgeability in these matters, my father seemed to include himself in the military caste. All his life he used to say: “We Filatov`s have always stood on guard for the state.” When I watched films about the Great Patriotic War [World War II], I often had questions – for example, why at the beginning of the war our troops retreated. My father would answer my question very thoroughly, both about the beginning of the war in 1939 and about the initial testing of the Russians’ strength during the invasion of Poland by Soviet troops. He would explain to me what caused the difficulties with our armaments in the first days of the war. Despite the fact that he, as an invalid, was released from serving in the army, he cited amazingly detailed examples.
For example, he used to talk about how during the Second World War we had to take Rostov twice because the Germans left a barrel of alcohol there – not a barrel really, but a cistern. The Russian soldiers got thoroughly drunk, and the Germans retook Rostov back. So we had to take it a second time. But when the Germans attacked initially, the Russians used electric fences for the first time. They placed them on the banks of the Don and dug them into the sand. It was dreadfully hot, and the Germans were thirsty. When they crawled toward the river, the circuit was completed, and they stayed right there. I don’t know where he got this kind of information.
He used to tell us a great deal about the Russian tsars who built the state and as an example often cited Ivan III, the assembler and organizer of the Russian land, who gave the Russian people the chance to free themselves from the Mongol horde and get on their feet. He recommended that we read, by Ivanov; to get to know Russia’s history better. When he used to talk about the civil war, he would also mention the move the tsar’s family made from Tobolsk to Tyumen. He used to say that a brigade arrived under the command of the Cossack captain Gamin, or Gatin (unfortunately, I don’t remember precisely), for their rescue. He told us how well White intelligence functioned, especially on the railroads. The family had already been warned, men were ready, and it was just a matter of exploiting the situation at the proper time, but in Tyumen the guard was replaced, and the plan failed. Unfortunately, events followed a different scenario, although everything had been made ready to free them.
His artistic qualities were also outstanding. After they already had us, he and mama would perform in amateur shows, and he was invited to transfer to join a professional theater. What astonishes
me most of all is where a former homeless child learned to play keyboard instruments. To this question of mine he would reply in the orphanage in Kaluga – moreover he not only played the harpsichord, piano, and organ, but also knew how to tune them. He loved the balalaika, and although he did not play the guitar he told me that the piano and guitar have identical pitch. He played the concertina, bayan, and accordion and taught them to us. His favorite artists were Shchepkin, Okhlopkov, Chaliapin, Sobinov, and Caruso. He used to say that his mother played the piano, usually Chopin or Beethoven. He himself liked to listen to Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky – Korsakov. He taught us to sing without tensing the vocal cords, but achieving a smooth tone without strain. His manner of singing was quiet and calm, but very expressive. He sang ballads, operatic arias, and long Russian folk songs and knew an enormous number of chastushki [humorous folk ditties]. I would assist father with endless alterations of the house. At leisure we would play chess. It was a great pleasure to him. He was an excellent chess-player despite his old age, knew by heart a lot of openings. He went on solving chess problems. He had related textbooks, journals. He kept analyzing the games of all the famous chess-players —Alekhin, Eive, Kapablanka, Chigorin, Botvinnik, Spasskiy, Tal’, Cheburdanidze, Karpov. Father knew also the local chess-players, especially in Orenburg. He taught his children how to arrange a defence – Cicilian, Indian, etc. He would always record in pencil the games on sheets of paper or put down important moves on a press-cutting with a chess-board. He called chess the game of tsars. Chess was his passion. He began teaching us various chess openings at the