Kolya Derevenko’s Story: Tsarevich Alexei’s best friend remembers

The son of the imperial physician, Nikolai Vladimirovich Derevenko, born in 1906, two years after the Heir Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, had become his best friend. During his long life, he never wanted to talk about his friend’s life or death, it was all too painful for him. When one of his associates tried to convince him to publish a book about his friendship with the Russian Heir to the throne, and about his experience in Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg, Nikolai exclaimed: “Don’t you understand, all my life I have tried to forget that horror! If I allow myself to remember, I would not be able to live, could not work, could not exist, would lose my mind.“ Only shortly before his death in 2004, did Kolya agree to an interview, which was video recorded for posterity. Here I present a part of the interview, where he remembers learning of Alexei’s murder after returning to Ekaterinburg at the end if July 1918, and about the sorrow and devastation he felt that summer, a