• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2305 0

use of every room in the Winter Palace and the country residences in the early part of the century. He knew the names and titles of all the members of the tsar’s family and the branched network of the dynasty, all the court positions,… and so on. The consultant also knew the accepted protocol for all the court ceremonies and rituals as well as the dates of the various name days in the tsar’s family and other ceremonies marked in the Romanov family circle. To all these questions the patient responded utterly accurately and without the slightest thought. For him it was as elementary as a primer.… From a few answers it was clear that he possessed wider knowledge in this sphere.… His behavior was as always: calm and dignified. Then the consultant asked the women to leave and he examined the patient below the waist, in front and in back. When we walked in (the patient had been dismissed) the consultant was blatantly dismayed. It turned out that the patient had a cryptorchidism (one testicle had not descended), which the consultant knew had been noted in the dead heir Alexei. We had not known that….

“… The consultant explained the situation to us: there was a dilemma and we needed to make a joint decision—either put a diagnosis of ‘paranoia’ in a stage of good remission with the possibility of employing the patient in his former occupations at his place of confinement, or consider the case unresolved and in need of additional observation in the hospital. In that case, however, we would be obliged to motivate our decision carefully for the organs of procuratorial oversight, which would inevitably send a special investigator from Moscow.… Having weighed these possibilities, we considered it to the patient’s good to give him a definite diagnosis of paranoia, of which we were not entirely certain, and return him to camp.… The patient agreed with our decision about returning to camp (naturally he was not told his diagnosis) and we parted friends.”

Dr. Kaufman’s letter was so eloquent that I wondered whether I wasn’t a victim of mystification. I believed her.

——

Here is a letter from the deputy chief physician of Psychiatric Hospital Number 1 in the Karelian ASSR, V. E. Kiviniemi, who verified this patient’s medical history, which is kept in the hospital archives:

“In my hands is medical history no. 64 for F. G. Semyonov, born 1904, admitted to psychiatric hospital January 14, 1949. Noted in red pencil ‘prisoner.’ … Released from the hospital April 22, 1949, to ITK [corrective labor camp] No. 1 (there is the signature of the convoy head, Mikheyev).

“Semyonov was admitted to the hospital from the ITK clinic. The doctor’s order … describes the patient’s acute psychotic condition and indicates that Semyonov kept ‘cursing someone named Beloborodov.’ Entered the psychiatric hospital in a weakened physical condition, but without acute signs of psychosis.… From the moment he entered was polite, sociable, behaved with dignity and modesty, neat. A doctor in the medical history notes that in conversation he did not conceal his origins. ‘His manners, tone, and conviction speak to the fact that he was familiar with the life of high society before 1917.’ F. G. Semyonov told how he was tutored at home, that he was the son of the former tsar, that he had been rescued during the time when the family perished, was taken to Leningrad, where he lived for a certain period of time, served in the Red Army as a cavalryman, studied at an economics institute (evidently in Baku), after graduating worked as an economist in Central Asia, was married, his wife’s name was Asya, and then said that Beloborodov knew his secret and was blackmailing him.… In February 1949 was examined by a psychiatrist from Leningrad, Gendelevich, to whom Semyonov declared that he had nothing to gain from appropriating someone else’s name, that he was not expecting any privileges, since he understood that various anti-Soviet elements might gather around his name and so as not to cause any trouble he was always prepared to leave this life. In April 1949 Semyonov underwent a forensic