Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [235]
“As a result of the secret service’s work, V. M. Kornilov was arrested. V. M. Kornilov, who was apprehended in Tobolsk, revealed the actual location of the valuables.
“On Kornilov’s instruction, valuables were removed in two large glass jars, which had been placed in small wooden receptacles.
“They were dug up in the cellar of Kornilov’s house.”
These fantastic jewels, which had glittered at tsarist balls, had been buried under the floor of the Kornilov house.
There is a photograph in the file of the GPU workers “with the confiscated jewels.”
——
“Appraisal of the valuables.
“In all, 154 objects were confiscated, for a total value of 3,270,693 rubles (gold rubles), 50 kopeks.
“Among the confiscated valuables were:
“1. A diamond brooch (100 carats),
“2. Three hat pins (44 and 36 carats),
“3. A diamond crescent (70 carats) [according to reports, this crescent was a gift to the tsar from the Turkish sultan],
“4. 4 diadems of the tsaritsa, and others.”
This successful operation inaugurated a real hunt for the tsarist diamonds.
First they went after the relatives of everyone connected with the Romanovs’ Tobolsk confinement.
They found and questioned the relatives of the murdered cook Kharitonov, but without success.
They located the widow of Colonel Kobylinsky, who had been shot during the civil war.
They sought her out in the small town of Orekhovo-Zuevo, where the unlucky woman had attempted to hide, living quietly with her fourteen-year-old son Innokenty, and had worked at Karbolit, a local factory.
She told them about the sovereign’s cap and the tsarist jewels, which her husband had brought home to show her and which according to rumors had later been hidden on some isolated squatter’s holding in the taiga. (Captain Aksyuta had told the truth: the tsaritsa’s jewels and the tsar’s cap had been buried in the taiga!)
Through the Kobylinsk Secret Police they picked up the trail of Pechekos’s sister and brother, whom the Kobylinskys had stayed with in 1918 in Tobolsk and who, according to Kobylinskaya, knew about the cache.
First they arrested Anelia Pechekos. Evidently they interrogated her rather zealously, and Pechekos realized she wouldn’t be able to hold out.
“On July 8, 1934, Anelia Vikentievna Pechekos died in prison after swallowing iron objects.”
Her arrested brother threw himself out a window, but survived.
Realizing that these people would rather die than reveal the secret, the secret police decided to release Pechekos from prison and put him under permanent surveillance, which went on for decades and was lifted only after Pechekos’s death.
The searches kept up. They interrogated people who had known the deceased valet Chemodurov. They determined that the old man had died in the house of the barman Grigory Solodukhin, “who according to rumors had amassed great valuables.”
But they couldn’t arrest Solodukhin. In 1920 shortsighted Chekists had shot him.
Nonetheless, they did finally pick up a fresh trail.
They determined that the tsaritsa had instructed Father Alexei (the same priest who had once prayed for “A long life!” for the tsar’s family in Tobolsk) “to carry out and conceal a case containing diamonds and gold objects of not less than one pood [36 pounds].”
And once again they met with failure: Father Alexei had managed to pass away in 1930.
They interrogated his children. But the children didn’t know anything. Father Alexei had safely hidden the tsarist case.
So perhaps even now, buried somewhere in the cellar of an old Tobolsk house, is a brown leather case bearing the tsarist coat of arms and a pood of jewels, and somewhere in the taiga of Siberia still lie the tsar’s cap and the Romanov diamonds.
I’m never going to finish this book!
The letters keep arriving, such as this one from St. Petersburg with information on that strange man Filipp Semyonov, who considered himself Alexei’s savior. Apparently, during the Khrushchev era the alleged tsarevich went