CHAPTER IX
It was announced to the people, precisely as it had been to foreign courts, that the Tsarevitch had died of apoplexy.
But the Russian people did not believe it. Some asserted he had died under his father’s blows; others shook their heads dubiously, as much as to say, “the affair went off too quickly to be quite straightforward.” Others again maintained that the Tsarevitch had not died; that an officer of the Guards who resembled him had been buried in his stead, while he himself had fled from his father, away to the monasteries beyond the Volga, or else to the Cossacks in the steppes beyond the “free rivers,” where he was in hiding.
A few years later, there appeared, among the Yamen Cossacks, a certain Timofée, the Worker; who looked like a mendicant, and when asked his name and whence he came, he would say:—
“From the clouds, from the air. The staff is my father; the wallet my mother. My name is Worker, because I am working at a great work of God’s.”
At times he would secretly say about himself:—
“I am neither a moujik, nor a moujik’s son; I am an eagle and the son of an eagle; an eagle I shall be! I am the Tsarevitch, Alexis Petrovitch. I have the mark of a cross on my back and that of a sword on my thigh——”
So people said about him:—
“He is not an ordinary being; he will one day make the earth tremble.”
In the anonymous letters he used to distribute among the Cossacks, it was said:—
“Blessed be our God! We, Alexis Petrovitch, are going to reclaim our ancestral rights; we count upon you Cossacks, as on a stone wall, to help us protect the Old Faith and the people. And you, bourlaks, shelterless, barefooted poor folk, whenever you hear our call, hasten, day and night, to rejoin us.”
The “Worker” went through the steppes collecting an army, promising to discover a city which held the insignia of the Virgin Mary, the gospel, the cross, and the standards of Alexander of Macedonia; then he, the Tsarevitch Alexis Petrovitch, will reign, and when at the end of the world Antichrist appears, he will wage war against him and all his armies of evil spirits.
The “Worker” was arrested, put to the torture and had his head cut off as a pretender.
But the people went on believing that the Tsarevitch Alexis Petrovitch would come in his own good time, that he would take his place on the ancestral throne, have all the boyars executed and be gracious unto the poor common folk.
Thus, even after his death, Alexis remained for the people, “Russia’s Hope.”