Bear give me a good idea: starts new threads to discuss OTMAA pretenders. I hope you enjoy this first story, that I pic from "The Last Tsar" by Edvard Radzinsky. Some og you may already know it:
This claimant was named Filipp Grigorievich Semionov, and appeared for the first time in the psychiatrical hospital of Petrozavodsk. He had tryed to help a lady in a prisonner camp, and when the guards come to avoid him to do so, he had an attack. So, they send him to the hospital. It was in 1948.
When Semionov arrived to the hospital, he had a psychotic attack, was very nervous, moving in all directions, and crying swears to a certain Belovorodov. After a while, he became wuiet, and when the doctors and nurses wanted to know more things about him, he revealed to them that he was born in 1904, in St. Petesburg. They noticed that his way of talking was much like the high St. Petesburg class one in the Tsar's days. He know many details about noble families from the Old Russia, and of course, a lot of little details about Romanov family. Finally, Semionov "confessed": he was the Tsarevitch Alexei. He told how he had survived the Ekaterinburg massacre. He was sitting near his "father", and when shots started, Nicholas put his "son's" head over his chest, for avoid him to see what was going on. "Alexei" didn't hear what Yourovsky was saying. He only hear the shots. He was wounded in the bottom
, and he lost conscience, falling over some of his family's bodies. When he awake, he was out the cellar, for a "nice guy" was taking care of him.
In this point, there is no more explanations about what happened in the cellar, but Radzinsky claims that Semionov got in some troubles and he ends put in a prisonner camp. And after it, he was send to the psychiatric hospital. He was always saying that "Belovorodov" knew about his secret and was always frightening him.
Radzinsky stands that all the doctors there and the nurses believed his story, and much more when they discovered that the "Tsarevitch" suffered from a very rebell "haematuria" and had chriptorchidia , just like Alexei. But they knew that they couldn't recognize him, for it would be trouble with the authorities for the prisonner. A psychiatre from Leningrad examine him in 1949, and said that was better for him to go to another psychiatric hospital for a while. Semionov agreed with him, for he didn't want to do his claim public; he didn't want trouble for him, nor for people who was interested in his case. After it, he desappeared in the world. He had studied economy in Baku, and he had worked as economist in Central Asia. His wife was also named Asia.
As for his physical appareance , he had a thin, lon face, blue or gray prominent eyes, a large forehead, and even if he was almost bald, his few hairs were chestnut, with a little gray in them. He reminded the doctors and nurses the Tsar Nicholas II and also Nicholas I.
I never saw a pic from him, but I read that Radzinsky had some...How I wish to saw it!
RealAnastasia.
P.S: I beg pardon for my awful, awful English! It's only my third language...
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