(Continued from page 23)

The Benckendorff family can trace its military history in Eastern Europe back as far as the twelfth and thirteenth century.  By the time that Nicholas II had ascended the throne in 1894 there had been members of the Benckendorff clan in the Russian Imperial court for the better part of two hundred years.

The first member of the family to appear in the court at St. Petersburg was Johann Michael who, as a young boy, served as a page to Tsar Peter II just before his death in 1730.  Johann's eldest son Christoph served under Catherine the Great's son Paul from 1776-81.  Twenty years later the third Benckendorff in the line, Alexander, was a participant in the assassination of Paul I in the fourth year of his reign in 1801.

Born in Tallinn (then Reval) in 1781, Alexander fought against Napoleon in the War of 1812 and became Aide de Camp to Tsar Alexander I in 1819.  When that Tsar disappeared and was succeeded by his brother Nicholas I in 1825 Alexander was credited with quelling the Decembrist Uprising and rewarded by being made Chief of the Third Department, the nineteenth century version of the KGB.  He was granted the hereditary title of Count (Graf) in 1832.

Alexander was blessed with three daughters before he died in 1844 but had no sons and so the title was passed on to his oldest nephew Konstantin.  The next two Counts in the line were the brothers Alexander and Paul, both faithful members of the court of Nicholas II.  Alexander was Russia's ambassador in London during the years up to and including the First World War and died there less than three months before the Tsar's abdication in March 1917.  His younger brother Paul was Grand Marshall of the Tsar's Imperial Court and could well be the most important figure in our story of Alexei's survival.

From the moment that the head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, had placed Nicholas and his family on a train for Siberia in August of 1917 the Count Paul Benckendorff made every effort to initiate a rescue or find a place of exile for the banished Royals. The Tsar's Grand Marshall was a meticulous record keeper and a stickler for detail who would leave no stone unturned.  Paul remained in control of the Tsar's accounts and tried to raise money for the imprisoned Romanovs with the help of Empress Alexandra's friend Anna Vyrubova, while his stepson Prince Vasily Dolgoruky stayed near the Royal family in the Siberian town of Tobolsk to look after matters at that end.

Paul Benckendorff died in January of 1921 in a small hospital in the Estonian border town of Narva where he had fallen ill after being stopped at the border by visa problems.  Author Robert Massie suggested in his well known work "Nicholas and Alexandra" that the Count had decided to leave Russia after giving up his painstaking efforts to trace all of the rumours about the Imperial family and the disappearance of his stepson.  What has been unknown until now is that eight months later a family of six crossed into Estonia at that same border town of Narva.  That group included yet another Benckendorff and the missing Tsarevich Alexei masquerading as one of the sons.

©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                                        (Continued on page 25)