Word: czars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Punishment. There is an eleven-year gap in the legend-until 1836, when a tall stranger with a flowing beard and erect military bearing rode into the Siberian outpost of Krasnoufimsk on a white horse. He carried his right hand on his hip in the manner of the late Czar; he spoke fluent French and a kind of Russian that was half church-Slavic, half Latin; he carried an icon with the initials A.I. The peasants began to wonder if this might not be Alexander the Blessed. When the stranger, who gave his name as Fyodor Kuzmich but could produce...
...memory of his murdered father, Paul I, and half-crazed by a sense of guilt for Napoleon's burning of Moscow. A handsome rakehell, Alexander had latterly fallen under the influence of Baroness Barbara Juliana von Kriüdener, a Baltic Billy Sunday who converted the Czar into a rabid religious mystic. Thus in 1825 he decided to change his life...
...Fyodor Kuzmich's peasant compatriots, there could be no doubt that he was the Czar. He awed them with his humble beekeeping and mysterious tales of life in the czarist court. "When Napoleon was marching on Moscow," Kuzmich would relate, "the Czar went to pray at the casket of St. Serge of Radonezh. The cathedral was dark, and he was alone. Suddenly he heard a voice: 'Go, Alexander, and trust your general.' " And so Russia won its first patriotic...
...Resolve. When Kuzmich died in 1864, believers in the legend noted that Alexander's aged courtiers finally went into mourning-something they had scrupulously avoided in 1825. Two years later, in 1866, rumors swept the capital that Alexander's tomb had been opened by night with the Czar's approval. The supposition: that Kuzmich-Alexander was being returned from his grave in Tomsk to the tomb in the Fortress of Peter and Paul...
...enough. By bringing to public attention the life of a mystic and martyr, a pre-Soviet hero and reformer, Russia's new bosses are showing a broad-mindedness far greater than that of their predecessors. The resurgence of the Alexander legend shows an acceptance of not only a Czar but an aspect of pro-Bolshevik history that transcends the rigid confines of Marxist-Leninist "truth...