(Continued from page 31)

Alexei was seventeen when he left the country that his family had ruled for more than three hundred years and, after moving around Estonia for a while, settled in Tallinn.  The city was to serve as his home base for the next two decades while he travelled much of the world.  He served time in the Estonian army and developed ties with the Forest Brothers resistance group.

Managing to hide his identity as heir to the Romanov throne while living as a prominent member of the community, Alexei did work in an art studio and lived only a stone's throw away from a house that his ancestor Peter the Great had built with his own hands.  His widow explains that in 1937 her husband acquired his own publishing house and worked openly as Editor-in-Chief of seven Estonian newspapers, some of which took an anti-Communist stance.  It was then that he began using the pen name of Heino Tammet.

Translated from Estonian into English the name Heino Tammet becomes Henry Oak.  The name Henry means "home ruler" or "royal ruler" and Tammet means "Oak" or "Oak Tree", so the man's pseudonym can be interpreted as "Royal Oak".  Could it be that the heir to the Russian throne who was hiding from the Soviets was referring to the event three hundred years earlier when the heir to England's throne, Charles II, was hiding in an oak tree to escape Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads?

After Hitler and Stalin divided the Baltic States between them in August of 1939 Estonia found itself under Soviet control when World War II erupted that September.  It changed hands as the Nazi juggernaut advanced towards the Tsar's old capital city, where the siege of Leningrad would test the mettle of Russian citizens for nine hundred consecutive days before they managed to beat the German forces back.  Conditions soon forced Alexei's newspapers to stop printing, so the Tsarevich turned his talents to producing postcards.

While the Crown Prince was shipping his cards out by the truckload he discovered that there was another way to make extra pocket money.  Nazi officers whose armies were laying waste to Alexei's old hometown of St. Petersburg eagerly paid him to paint pictures of Adolf Hitler... Nazi officers who never knew the true identity of the artist who was pocketing their money.

In late 1943 Alexei arranged a marriage of convenience so that he would be eligible for a Finnish passport and the acting Finnish Ambassador helped him to escape the war zone.  Leaving for Finland during the first days of 1944, Alexei made his way to safer territory onboard a ship loaded with refugees that was strafed by Allied planes as it sailed across the Baltic Sea.

After a few months in Finland, Alexei crossed the Baltic again to Sweden where the courts put an end to his first wedding vows and, as Heino Tammet, he was married for the second time.  His new wife had blessed him with two sons before they immigrated to Canada in 1952... but he never told her his true story.
©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                               (Continued on page 33)