(Continued from page 11)

After the execution our Alexei had two more episodes before the age of seventeen that his foster family thought were typhoid fever.  It did not come back to haunt him until his body started to run down after he passed seventy.  For two years before he died in anonymity the Tsarevich exhibited exactly the same episodes that he had as a youngster.

As he lay dying in a Vancouver area hospital bed his modern doctors did test after test and first settled on a diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.  Alexei told them to go back and try again because that was not it.  More tests were done while he survived on transfusions of whole blood for as many as six weeks at a time, before they finally decided that it was leukemia that he had.  Let us go back to the scientists again for just a moment... Since Alexei was being treated with transfusions right up until his final passing that means he had the DNA of other people flowing through his veins at the time of his death.  That fact could further complicate any testing that might be attempted to identify his remains. 

Alexei knew the cancer in his blood had become a death sentence and managed to maintain his pride and dignity to the end in spite of it.  He had told his wife that he blamed himself for the Russian Revolution and he had a bitter hatred for the Soviet régime that killed his family and oppressed the people of the country they had ruled for more than three hundred years.  While his disease and the questionable influence of Rasputin had been the catalyst that speeded up the revolution, it did not cause it.  Change was inevitable after three centuries of autocracy under the Romanovs and nothing could have stopped it.

©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                                      (Continued on page 13)