Alexei's education was very poor, by the standards of previous heirs to the throne. The Tsarevich Alexander Nikolaevich (Alexander II) had the great Russian poet Zhukovsky as his tutor. Even the Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich (Nicholas II) had the great Russian philosophical thinker Konstantin Pobedonostsev as his chief tutor. And Alexei Nikolaevich had as his tutors... three total unknowns to Russian (or any other) letters, named Petrov, Gilliard, and Gibbes. Only one of them Russian by birth, by the way, and he in his dotage, by all accounts. No, there's no mistaking it, Nicholas and Alexandra were afraid to demand too much of their sickly son and heir. They were also intensely suspicious of true Russian intellectuals (who generally had liberal tendencies, believing in the rights of man, civil liberties, and all that kind of democratic "nonsense"). So even though they had an absolute wealth of Russian geniuses to choose from at the turn of the twentieth century, which witnessed what can only be called an explosion in literary and philosophical talent (the poets Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, Vladimir Soloviev, and many others spring to mind) they chose... Petrov, Gilliard and Gibbes. Totally middle-class, middle-of-the-road nonentities. Internationally unknown. Unknown even in their own countries, in their own fields of expertise. Yes, true enough, decent human beings (as no doubt Blok, Belyi and Soloviev were decent human beings) but not exactly what you'd expect intellectually from the tutors of the Heir to the throne of the Tsar of All the Russias, to put it mildly... But enough said!
