In this episode, we look at the story of the oddly refined peasant wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, who was claimed by many to be the dead tsar Alexander I. The myth and its staying power are rooted in several sources, not least the peculiar circumstances of the emperor's death and popular conceptions of monarchy.
Source
M. P. Rey, Alexander I: The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon (trans. S. Emanuel. DeKalb: NIU Press, 2016)
The colour photographs of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii fascinated the imperial public of the early 20th century, persuading Emperor Nicholas II to sponsor expeditions across the...
In 1910, Europe and Russia were rocked by a sensational murder trial: three Russians stood accused of conspiring to murder one of their compatriots...
In the early nineteenth century, Raffaele Scassi, Genoese gambler and ne'er-do-well, found himself in the newly founded Black Sea port of Odessa. This was...
