Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [223]
In any event, I thought of my strange guest again when I received this letter from a psychiatrist, Dr. D. Kaufman of Petrozavodsk:
“This will be about a man who for a time was in treatment in a psychiatric hospital in Petrozavodsk, where I worked on staff from September 1946 to October 1949, after graduating from the Second Leningrad Medical Institute, now a medical hygiene institute.
“… Our patient load consisted of both civilians and prisoners, whom we were sent during those years for treatment or for legal-psychiatric examination.
“… In 1947 or 1948 in the wintertime another prisoner came to us as a patient. He was suffering from severe psychosis of the type called hysterical psychogenic reaction. His mind was not clear, he was disoriented, he did not understand where he was.… He waved his arms about and tried to run away.… Amid incoherent utterances in a mass of other expressive exclamations the name ‘Beloborodov’ flashed by two or three times. At first we paid no attention to it, since it didn’t mean anything to us. From his accompanying documents … we found out he had been in the camps for a long time and that his psychosis had developed suddenly, when he had attempted to defend a woman (prisoner) from being beaten by a guard. He was tied up and, naturally, ‘worked over.’ Although as far as I recall no visible bodily injuries were noted when he entered the hospital. His documents indicated his date of birth as 1904; as for his first and last names, I can’t remember them exactly. The variations I recall are the following: Semyon Grigorievich Filippov, or Filipp Grigorievich Semyonov. After one to three days, as usually happens in these cases, the manifestation of severe psychosis had disappeared completely. The patient became calm, in full contact. Clear awareness and proper behavior were maintained from then on for his entire stay at the hospital. His appearance, as far as I can say, was like this: a rather tall man, somewhat stout, sloping shoulders, slightly round-shouldered, and so on. A long, pale face, blue or gray, slightly bulging eyes, a high forehead receding into a balding head, the remaining hair chestnut with gray….”
(After this she talked about how the patient was sincere with her.)
“… So, it became known to us that he was the heir to the crown, that during the hasty execution in Ekaterinburg his father had hugged and pressed his face to him so that he wouldn’t see the rifle barrels aimed at him. In my opinion, he had not even realized that something terrible was going on since the commands to fire were uttered unexpectedly, and he didn’t hear the sentence read. All he remembered was the name Beloborodov.… Shots rang out, he was wounded in the buttocks, he lost consciousness, and he collapsed on a common heap of bodies. When he woke up, he found he had been saved, someone had dragged him out of the cellar, carried him out, and ministered to him for a long time.”
Then followed the story of his further life and the stupidities that led him to the camp. But the most interesting part came at the end of this long letter.
“Gradually we began to look at him with other eyes. The persistent hematuria he suffered from found an explanation. The heir had had hemophilia. On the patient’s buttocks was an old cross-shaped scar.… Finally we realized who the patient’s appearance reminded us of—the famous portraits of Nicholas, not only Nicholas I but Nicholas II … Dressed in a quilted jacket and striped pajama trousers over felt boots instead of a hussar’s uniform.
“… At that time consultants used to come to us from Leningrad for two or three months at a time.… Professor S. I. Gendelevich was consulting with us then. The best psychiatric practitioner I ever met. Naturally, we showed him our patient.… For two or three hours he ‘pursued’ him with questions we could not have asked, since we were not conversant, but it turned out he was. So, for example, the consultant knew the layout and