The following was written by a close friend of mine who invested years of his life into my own. Thank you, Sherwin, for the impact you’ve made. Take a few minutes to read through this and reflect on what the Son of God went through for us.
None of us asks to be born. The decision is made for us. None of us chooses our parents. It’s out of our hands. One day we wake up in the world and here we are.
As it turned out, Alexei was born into a famous family. The Romanov Dynasty had ruled Imperial Russia for three centuries. His father was the Tsar himself, Nicholas II. His mother, Tsarina Alexandra, was the granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria. Almost all the crowned heads of Europe, in fact, at the time of Alexei’s birth in 1904 were related either by marriage or by blood.
Blood. The force of life itself. Alexei’s blood was the blood of tsars. As the youngest child and only son of Nicholas and Alexandra, his title, by virtue of birth, was Tsesarevich, signifying his station as heir apparent. One day Alexei would rule in his father’s stead and all Russia would bow to Tsar Alexei II. He was told from earliest boyhood that this was his destiny. It was his lot because he was born, and because his father was the tsar. Royalty was in his blood. His son and his son’s son, like his father and his father’s father before him, would be Romanov tsars to the last hour of time.
Blood. The ensign of violent death. Something else was in the blood of the Tsesarevich. (That title was long even for the Russians, who shortened it to Tsarevich.) No, not in the blood, but omitted from his blood, to be technical. By the time the fledgling crown prince was a year old, doctors had determined that the Tsarevich lacked the agent in the blood that causes it to clot when injured. Alexei was a hemophiliac, a bleeder. Once the bleeding started, it might not be stopped. The slightest injury might prove fatal. Once the blood of this tsar-in-waiting was spilled, the bloodletting in Russia might go on indefinitely.
Blood. At once royal and potent, human and fragile. All in the blood. Alexei was born precariously on the pivot of contradictory extremes. An admixture of strength and vulnerability. Neither sought, both inherited without his own agency or desire. The Tsarevich would be omnipotent in Russia one day…if he survived another minute.
Frail. And because frail, protected. Overprotected? He was sheltered and guarded in his play. His mother fretted over him as if he were made of glass. The Tsar assigned two Imperial sailors, a naval Goodness and Mercy, to follow Alexei all the days of his life, lest he dash his foot against a stone…and hemorrhage. Not allowed to ride a bicycle or play tennis, Alexei cried, “Why can’t I be like everyone else? Why do other boys have everything and I, nothing?’’
As boy was all boy, he tired of their smothering presence and often took greater risks than necessary to challenge them. He sought out dangers, intrigued by the mysterious possibilities as surely as a moth courts the flame. “Look at fatty run!” he taunted the very agents charged with preserving his life even as he outran their desperate watchcare. It was mean. And it was the boy in him. And it is what a boy does who cannot play.
Because his father was Tsar, Alexei did not die at 2 or 4 or 6 or 8, as he may have if born under a peasant roof. His family had the means to provide him round-the-clock attendance, the privilege of royal power. And that extended his life.
When he was 10, he tripped, jumping into a boat. The mild foot injury soon became a full-blown crisis that imperiled his very life. “The days between the 6th and the 10th were the worst,” wrote the doting Tsar, “The poor darling suffered intensely, the pains came in spasms and recurred every quarter of an hour. His high temperature made him delirious night and day; and he would sit up in bed and every movement brought the pain again. He hardly slept at all, had not even the strength to cry, and kept repeating ‘Oh Lord have mercy upon me’.”
Nicolas asked a minister from the Imperial Court to prepare Alexei’s funeral. Himself sensing the end was near, Alexei said to his grieving mother, “When I am dead, it will not hurt anymore, will it Mama? When I am dead, build me a little monument of stones in the woods.”
Unexpectedly, the swelling began to ease that night and the pendulum shifted in favor of life. It would be two full years before recovery was complete, but it had begun. His sister Olga, soon after, found him lying on his back looking up at the clouds. Asked what he was doing, the pallid Tsarevich answered, “I like to think and wonder.” Olga asked what he liked to think about. “Oh, so many things. I enjoy the sun and the beauty of summer as long as I can. Who knows whether one of these days I shall not be prevented from doing it?”
Out for a peaceful carriage ride with his tutor, someone recognized the vehicle and shouted, “It’s the Heir!” and peasants rushed to surround the carriage. A hundred frenzied hands reached in the windows hoping to touch the seed royal and the delicate cargo became panicked. An accidental scratch might take his life. Relief came only when the police extricated him from his admirers.
The Tsarevich’s chubby cheeks yielded to lanky young manhood and he spent his time at his father’s side among the soldiers, with the army and learning the lessons of command in the field at Stavka. He was ever-so-proud of being named Lance Corporal at the ripe old age of 12. Of course, being the Tsarevich had everything to do with the rank, but it was fun and manly and sounded rugged and hardy. He, the bleeder, a “Lance Corporal”!
When the Russian peasants bowed before him, bearing gifts, Alexei invariably blushed with embarrassment. He was most uncomfortable with his elders kneeling at his feet. The Tsarevich would avert his eyes and wait for the awkward moment to pass. He was asked about this reluctance and said it made him feel odd, adding that his naval nursemaid nevertheless “says that it must be so”. He passed through a brief phase where he dealt with the discomfort badly. When one would genuflect before him, the young Tsarevich took to popping them in the nose. And the blood ran.
Blood. The key to Alexei’s life. The source of his strength, the fount of his weakness. The everything to his life and station. The explanation for everything. From beginning to end. Identity and destiny. Everything he was or could be was in the blood.
Maybe drawing blood was a way of toying with the mysterious fluid that constantly threatened everything that lay before his feet. The red stuff that always brought nurses and doctors running and set the palace in turmoil whenever he felt it oozing away. The strange scarlet puddle that could summon the Tsar himself, running. Power and impotence in one perforation of the skin. It was said that when the Tsarevich bled, death hung in the air, but when he was whole it was as though the sun had returned from behind a dark cloud and laughter filled the palace halls. When someone intervened on his behalf and the bowing was suspended, Alexei was “delighted to be freed from this irksome formality”.
He hadn’t asked for it. Not for life. Not for birth. Nor for station. Nor for hemophilia. Not for destiny or power. Not for protocol and ceremony. He might as easily have been born a beggar. All that came to him was neither to his credit, nor his fault. It was all—all of it—in his blood.
And then the fortunes changed. Political winds always do. There was a monk and guns and debating and shouting. Peasants and soldiers and snow and blood. People said terrible things about his father, worse about his mother. And the bodies kept falling in the snow. A man on a train who looked like the devil came from the west and the Tsarevich’s father signed his name on a paper that meant he wasn’t Tsar any more.
There was hurrying and packing and yelling, and Nicholas said it all meant Alexei wouldn’t get to be Tsar now, after all. Even though he was a Romanov and he was 13 already. Almost 14. They had to leave the palace. The peasants broke in and made them get on a train. They were sent far away to Siberia where it was always cold. And everything was different. People spoke to his father as if they were better than him. And he and Alexei had to saw wood—with their own hands!—just to keep a fire going. Nothing was the same. The sailor who had been his cherished protector for a decade now snarled icily at his former ward, ordering him on menial chores and errands, often contrived only to degrade the boy. Alexei was horrified when, watching his royal father riding a bicycle, a soldier thrust his bayonet between the spokes.
Alexei hadn’t asked for this either. Not the way people looked at him or the edge on their words. He hadn’t changed anything, but everything was different. He was still the same, but no one acted like it. The cold, the labor, the isolation. He hadn’t asked for any of it.
One night, when it was the last thing his parents needed, he took a wooden sled to the top of the stairs. Maybe it was just the stairs that called to the boy in him. Maybe because the sailors weren’t around. Maybe nerve is just in the blood of tsars. Maybe because if he couldn’t be tsar one day, he didn’t know how to be anything else. Maybe it was just being 13. But the wound was serious. And Alexei bled.
The wheelchair wasn’t what he’d wanted. But he was in it when they came to move the family. Again. They were taken to a house inEkaterinburg. In less than a month he would turn 14.
The knock came at 3:00 a.m. (The Bolshevik secret police like doing their dirty work in the middle of the night.) The family was to dress for relocation again. Alexei put on his clothes and his father scooped him up in his arms because of the sledding injury and carried him downstairs into the cellar where they were told to go. Alexandra asked for chairs for herself and her son and they were brought while they waited to be moved. Again.
The door opened and a number of Bolsheviks entered the room. Yakov Yurovsky announced that they were all to be executed and immediately assassinated Nicholas, the Tsarina, and the two male servants in an impromptu firing squad.
Alexei, they say, remained sitting in the chair, “terrified.” The revolutionaries, satisfied that his parents were sufficiently dead, turned their guns on the bleeder and fired mercilessly. The bullets tore into the flesh, breaking the fragile dam that unleashed that red torrential ribbon. The delicate Tsarevich fell to the floor in a pool of Romanov blood. The blood that had made him both an involuntary monarch and a hapless target.
But life persisted. Despite the hail of lead, the boy survived when survival was most cruel. The Marxists stepped forward and thrust their bayonets into Alexei again and again and again. As viciously opposite the treatment he had known for nearly 14 years as it is possible to imagine. Yurovsky, the murderer, recorded his own crime with pride: “Nothing seemed to work. Though injured, he continued to live.” Even the bayonets did not finish the boy.
The death squad did not know that beneath his tunic, Alexei wore a shirt wrapped in precious palace gems that had the unintended effect of deflecting the bullets and blows from his torso. Boots began savagely kicking and stomping the face and head of the fallen child. Yurovsky himself at last fired into his head, point-blank—twice. And Alexei, bleeding, died.
It was his four sisters’ turn.
“The baby lay on a pillow of cloth of gold, slung to the Princess’s shoulders by a broad gold band,” said the account of Alexei’s christening in the Russian Orthodox Church. “He was covered with the heavy cloth-of-gold mantle, lined with ermine, worn by the heir to the crown. The mantle was supported on one side by Prince Alexander Sergeiovich Dolgorouky, the Grand Marshal of the Court, and on the other by Count Benckendorff, as decreed by custom and wise precaution. The baby wept loudly, as might any ordinary baby, when old Father Yanishev dipped him in the font. His four small sisters, in short Court dresses, gazed open-eyed at the ceremony.”
Alexei hadn’t asked to be born a Romanov. Or Russian Orthodox. Or christened. Or a hemophiliac. Or a Tsarevich. He had done nothing to deserve the way he died.
People. People are such irrational, moody creatures. Especially when massed together. A delicate boy enters the world borne on an ermine-lined pillow of gold and the same people slash the blood from his body in an hour of madness because of where his father worked. Both adored and despised neither because of who he was nor a single thing he’d done. Hated without a cause.
Another Prince came to this world. Just to bleed. He, too, was His Father’s beloved and only begotten Son. His birth, too, was a royal celebration. A star lit his cradle and angels proclaimed His birth. He wasn’t born in the Winter Palace, surrounded by princesses and counts, but in a stable amidst oxen and cattle. He, too, was gentle. He was introduced by his cousin: “Behold, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world!” He was adored by the masses.
One day He rode into Jerusalem: “And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David: blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.” It was the ticker-tape parade of its day. If they’d had fireworks, they would have lavished them upon Him. King of the Jews! The Tsarevich of God the Father!
Seven days later the same crowd was shouting, “Away with Him! Away with Him! Crucify Him!” The 180 was so swift it made Pilate’s head swim. “Shall I crucify your king?” he asked, bewildered at the sudden shift. “We will not have this man to reign over us! We have no king but Caesar!”
They stripped and beat Him, spat in His face and mocked Him, plaited a crown of thorns and pressed it deep into the divine brow. And the blood ran. The royal blood. The torturers thrashed His back with brawny arms leaning into their leather whips as the jagged stone and bits of glass ripped away the flesh. “The plowers plowed upon My back: they made long their furrows.” When they had marred His visage more than any man’s—until He was unrecognizable as a human form and more resembled a bloody worm, they gave Him a rough-hewn wooden cross to carry. You don’t hold back when you mean to murder a man.
At last, they nailed His hands and feet to the cross and stood around hurling hatred as they watched Him die. And the bright red blood of their king ran. While they played games at the foot of His cross. Gambling for His coat—the only thing He left behind.
No bejeweled tunic shielded His chest from their lashes. He was widely open to every blow man wanted to inflict. As a lamb, dumb before His shearers. And we do it every day. We lay the lash to His back with our sin. The very sin He not only bore but became in order to bury it in His grave, once for all.
He was hated without a cause. The loathing heaped upon Him was out of all proportion to anything He had said or done. He never so much as popped a peasant in the nose. A fickle crowd turned on Him in less than a week and those who verily hailed Him in the next breath slew Him.
A golden pillow, a bayonet. A crown, a cross.
Rome. Paris. Dallas. Golgotha and guillotines. Regicide is the common habit of erratic man.
Brutus, Judas and I.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
The blood of God Himself was shed in Christ that we who slew Him might ourselves be saved through the power of His resurrection to life everlasting. The Tsarevich of God bled to transform sinners like us that we, His executioners, may share His crown, His kingdom and His throne. Today, He offers divine amnesty to all rebels and revolutionaries who have conspired against His crown. This hour is one of clemency. Easter reminds us, like nothing else, that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
The Masters Column 