In the early autumn of 1836, a tall elderly man dressed in peasant clothes rode up to the smithy on the outskirts of Krasnoufimsk, Perm province. Asking him to shoe a horse, he said that he was going “to see the world and see good people,” and introduced himself as “Fyodor Kuzmich”.
The wanderer's personality aroused some suspicions in the blacksmith, and he was not too lazy to report him to the police. Fyodor Kuzmich did not have his passport with him, and therefore he was arrested. During interrogation, the stranger said that he did not remember his kinship and that he did not know where it came from. For vagrancy he was given twenty lashes and sent on a convoy to a settlement in Siberia. Fyodor Kuzmich was satisfied with the verdict, but declared that he was illiterate (although subsequent facts refute this), and asked the petty bourgeois Grigory Shpynev to sign for him. A description of the mysterious prisoner has survived: “the height of 2 yards and 6 from 3/4 vershoks, gray eyes, hair on the head and beard light brown with gray, a round chin, on the back - traces of beating with a whip”.
On March 26, 1837, Fyodor Kuzmich arrived in the Bogotol volost of the Tomsk province, where he was placed at the Krasnorechensky distillery. As an elderly person, Fyodor Kuzmich was not involved in forced labor. The local Cossack Semyon Sidorov, seeing the elder's penchant for solitude, built him a neat cell-hut in the village of Beloyarskaya.
Having settled down, Fyodor Kuzmich walked a lot in neighboring villages, taught peasant children to read and write and the Holy Scriptures. According to the memoirs of his contemporaries, he perfectly knew the intricacies of etiquette, the various nuances of St. Petersburg court life, and expressed very correct and accurate remarks about all popular statesmen. Although he refused (and categorically) to express his opinion about the two emperors - Paul and Alexander. The elder was in close contact with Macarius, Bishop of Tomsk and Barnaul, and with Athanasius, Bishop of Irkutsk. By the way, the elder always spoke with the latter in excellent French.
His demeanor (for example, when talking, he typically kept his hands behind his belt), his hidden imperiousness, his deafness in one ear - all this was very reminiscent of Emperor Alexander. Talking once about the Krasnoyarsk authorities and being dissatisfied with something, the elder said: "… if I just bark a word in St. Petersburg, the whole Krasnoyarsk will shudder from what will happen."
Several Cossacks, who had previously served in St. Petersburg, and a certain priest, exiled to the Tomsk province from the capital, recognized the late emperor in the elder, swearing that they had seen him many times and could not be wrong. The elder never answered direct questions about his origin directly, but he always expressed himself evasively: “I am now free, independent, at peace. Before, I had to take care not to cause envy, to grieve that my friends were deceiving me, and much more. Now I have nothing to lose, except for what will always remain with me - except for the word of my God and love for the Savior and my neighbors. You do not understand what happiness is in this freedom of spirit."
The extensive correspondence conducted by Fyodor Kuzmich was not kept secret either. Among his many correspondents are Baron Dmitry Osten-Saken and even Emperor Nicholas I, with whom the elder exchanged encrypted letters. Having received the news of Nikolai's death, Fyodor Kuzmich ordered a panikhida to be served, during which he cried bitterly, as if about the death of a loved one.
In 1858 the elder moved to a cell built four versts from Tomsk by the merchant S. F. Khromov. Contemporaries recalled that the elder always celebrated the memory of Alexander Nevsky, and on that day a festive dinner was prepared for him. Fyodor Kuzmich said, recalling: "What celebrations were in St. Petersburg that day - they fired cannons, hung carpets, in the evening there was lighting throughout the city, and common joy filled human hearts …"
Promotional video:
The elder, already in Tomsk, also visited the Emperor Alexander II.
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Shortly before his death, as if anticipating death, Fyodor Kuzmich visited his old friend the Cossack Semyon Sidorov, and then returned to Tomsk, where his lingering illness began. Before his death, Father Raphael from the Alekseevsky Monastery visited him for confession, but even in confession the deeply religious elder refused to name his heavenly patron ("God knows this"), as well as the names of his parents ("The Holy Church prays for them"). Meanwhile, several local priests, whom the elder himself chose for confession, announced after his death that they knew who he was, but, referring to the secret of confession, they could not reveal this to the world.
The elder died on January 20, 1864 and was buried in the enclosure of the Theotokos-Alekseevsky monastery.
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The merchant Khromov, sorting out a few things left after the deceased, found among them:
- two sheets with the encrypted text of the notes;
- drawn monogram in the form of the letter "A";
- a document on the marriage of Emperor Alexander I: “a thick sheet of bluish color, where some of the words were typed, and some were written by hand; at the bottom of the sheet there was a white seal with the image of a church”;
- a small carved ivory crucifix;
- a psalter with the inscription: "This psalter belongs to the Saransk Peter and Paul monastery to the cassock monk Alexei Zolotarev";
- the chain of the Order of St. Andrew the First-Called.
The leaves with a mysterious cipher were never completely solved, and in 1909 the originals mysteriously disappeared. V. V. Baryatinsky, who tried to unravel the elder's secret, proposed the following version of decoding the texts of the notes:
- the front side of the first note: "You see, to what silence your happiness and your word doomed you";
- the reverse side of the first note: “But when the Alexandras are silent, the Pauls do not announce” (Baryatinsky assumed that this meant that when Alexander was silent, he was not tormented by remorse about Paul);
- the front side of the second note: “I hide you, Alexander, like an ostrich hiding its head under its wing”;
- the reverse side of the second note: "1837 MAP 26" (date of arrival of the elder to the place of exile), "c. ox "(B (V) Ogotolskaya volost - place of exile)," 43 Par "(forty-third party of exiles).
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It is known that the life surgeon DK Tarasov, who was with the emperor in Taganrog, according to Professor KV Kudryashov, until 1864 did not serve a requiem for Tsar Alexander I; when the elder Fyodor Kuzmich died in Siberia, Dmitry Klementyevich began to do this annually …”.
In 1904, a chapel was built on the elder's grave. In 1936 it was destroyed and a cesspool was built in its place. In 1984, Fyodor Kuzmich was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as righteous Theodore of Tomsk as part of the Cathedral of Siberian Saints.
On July 5, 1995, among the garbage in a cesspool, his relics were found: a coffin without a lid with bone remains. The skull was not there. According to one version, it was seized in the 60s of the XX century by Moscow archaeologists in order to prove or refute the legend about the identity of Alexander I and Fyodor Kuzmich.