Word: kuzmich
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 no papers to prove it, was sentenced to 20 lashes for vagrancy, a strange thing happened. Out from Moscow rode Grand Duke Michael, Alexander's younger brother. He personally threatened the judge with a lashing of his own. But after talking privately and reverentially with Kuzmich, Michael...
...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...
Rumors & 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...
...legend of Alexander's prolonged life captured the imagination of many obscure historians-and even that of Novelist Leo Tolstoy. In 1905, shortly before his death, Tolstoy began a fictional account titled Posthumous Notes on Fyodor Kuzmich. Another investigator has had better luck with the Soviet regime of Brezhnev and Kosygin. Writing in Izvestia's Sunday magazine last week, Journalist Lev Lyubimov revealed that the Russian government is pondering a plan to resolve the Alexandrian mystery once and for all. Lyubimov would like to open both Kuzmich's tomb in Tomsk and Alexander's in Leningrad...