A heart-to-heart conversations with the Tsesarevich Alexei. Oleg Filatov
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how he had fled and where he lived. He said that Kerensky made himself out to be a leader but in fact was an adventurist. My father would keep returning to the idea that tsars worried constantly about the state, the treasury, and the army, without which there was no state, and watched over their Orthodox Church. He told us how they killed Trotsky in Latin America.
My father was an invalid. (He used to say: “I was born a cripple like this.”) His left foot was withered, size 40, and his right a size 42. Once he said that his foot did not wither until about 1940. He had a curvature of the spine, many scars on his back and arms, and the traces of shrapnel wounds at his waist, under his left shoulder blade, and on his left heel. This evoked puzzled questions from us. The man had never been in a war, but he was so crippled. Where? When? But it was not done to talk about this in our family. Once as a child I saw his wounded back and asked him what had happened. “Well,” he said, “there was a certain business. They were shooting in a basement, killing people.” When I asked him what happened to his foot, he waved his hand and said that if they had cut off his other foot he would have been totally incapable of work. “But this way I can work and earn my living.” His foot always hurt, he had cut himself with a razor somehow on the heel, and he had a terrible scar there. He went especially to Leningrad to buy “general’s boots,” which had a high instep and were sometimes sold in the 1960s. He said that previously he had had an orthopedic insert; they had given him massages, stretched and massaged his foot. He had wanted to have an operation, but he was afraid his heart couldn’t take it, even though he was relatively young.
It must be said that he never went to doctors and no certificates of his illness remain. Only once, in 1975, we made him go for a physical. This is the only information we have about the state of his health. By the way, we have never had photographs of my father in his younger years. There are a few from before the war, and those there were had been taken much later. Generally speaking, we have very few documents for him, although he taught us to store every document and every paper carefully and never lose anything. He would tell us that his birth certificate had been lost and so he had had to reconstruct it from the church’s registers. “So it was a dentist who established my age. But he was wrong.” My mother remembers that he confessed to her in 1952 that he was forty eight.
Despite his disability, he possessed stunning endurance. He could go great distances without a stick, favoring first one leg and then the other. He made these treks daily, especially in the summer on his days off, when he walked a couple of miles to the river to fish. He was very strong spiritually and carried himself with the greatest dignity. I don’t remember an instance when he was humiliated by anyone or called an invalid. He himself simply came undone whenever his illness kept him from doing something. This would get discussed and then he would calm down. All his life he did certain special calisthenics and said that without them he would be as skinny as a rail.
Often he would suddenly fall ill. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but he never went to doctors. He would put himself to bed and lie there for hours on end. He swallowed certain tablets and was always taking ascorbic acid. When I would ask him what was wrong with him, he would answer: “I got this from my parents. And I was left a cripple my whole life. People said my parents should not have married, but they did and gave birth to me the way I am.” When he was in pain from being hit by something in the foot, he would bandage up the bruise and put himself to bed or sit hunched over, muttering something nonstop. Once I heard him repeating the Our Father. This was his defense. He used to say: “There couldn’t be anything more terrible in life. The most terrible thing of all is theIpatievcellar.” Of course, these phrases sank into our minds.
Usually he got up early, did his calisthenics, splashed himself with cold water, and always shaved very carefully. This amazed me and I would ask, “Papa, what are you, a soldier?” He would answer: “No, but my ancestors were all soldiers.” He was painstaking and neat about his apparel, and if he was going anywhere, then the packing was an entire process. He went off to work with dignity, and we saw that this was his principal business. After I was 16, he began having me lift weights and dumbbells. In the summer I loved to swim and did this very well. He told us it was easiest of all to swim on your back or do the butterfly, if you didn’t make noise.
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