Volkov, Alexey Andreevich (valet)

From the peasants. He was drafted into the Russian Imperial Army - first in the Life Guards Pavlovsky Regiment , and then - in the Combined Guards Battalion. In 1884, in Peterhof, as a senior non-commissioned officer of the battalion, he trained the military system of the heir to Tsarevich Nikolai Alexandrovich - from that time on he personally became familiar to the future All-Russian Emperor. In the fall of 1886, after five years of service in the Army, he entered the service of the wardrobe manager to Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich ^[1] .

Thanks to the service under Pavel Alexandrovich, he attended the engagement in the spring of 1894 in Coburg of the future Emperor Nicholas II with the Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt - Alice: the wedding of Princess Alice's brother, Duke Ernest-Ludwig of Hesse , was officially announced and Nikolai Alexandrovich and the Grand Dukes officially went to this wedding guests, in fact, the heir to the Russian throne went to Germany to ask for the hands and hearts of his beloved. During his stay in Coburg, Volkov met the future empress personally - he delivered her an expensive gift from Pavel Alexandrovich ^[2] .

After Pavel Aleksandrovich was widowed and, contrary to the monarch’s will, remarried with an organic marriage , Nicholas II deprived him of state support, military ranks and other things. Pavel Aleksandrovich had to dissolve his own court of the Grand Duke and Volkov was taken off the staff, while he was assigned a pension of 25 rubles per month and provided with a state-owned premises in Petersburg on Alekseevskaya Street. Soon, under the patronage of the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, Volkov was again accepted into the service of the court department as vice-gof-fourier of Nicholas II ^[1] .

After Nicholas II assumed the post of Supreme Commander-in-Chief and spent most of his time in Mogilev at Headquarters , Volkov was appointed to be a valet with the sovereign's wife, Alexander Fedorovna. Refuting the dirty rumors about the relationship of G. E. Rasputin with the empress, Volkov recalled that for all the time of his service personally with Alexandra Feodorovna, when not one of the visitors could go to the tsarina without notifying her valet about it, Rasputin was only a few times, and each time in the presence of the king or children and his visits did not last more than 10 minutes ^[1] .

According to the memoirs of Volkov himself, in the winter of 1916-1917, when A.D. Protopopov was the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire , Volkov was the link between Protopopov and the Empress, to whom Protopopov transmitted secret telephone messages from Petrograd to Tsarskoye Selo about the state of affairs in the capital - these Volkov received telephone messages and reported their contents to Alexandra Fedorovna ^[1] .

After the February Revolution, he voluntarily remained in Tsarskoye Selo with the family of the renounced emperor and, along with them, was subjected to a prison regime. Volkov recalled that after the arrival of the tsarist train in Tsarskoye Selo on March 23, 1917, ranks of retinues — the Duke of Leuchtenberg , General Naryshkin , adjutant of the emperor Mordvinov — fled straight from the train so that they would no longer appear near the disowned emperor. August 1, 1917 voluntarily followed the royal family into exile in Tobolsk . Volkov wrote that before the Bolshevik coup, during the stay of the imperial family under arrest in Tsarskoye Selo and Tobolsk, the actions of the guard, delivering unpleasant moments for the arrested, did not come from the evil intentions of the guards, but because of ignorance of the etiquette and bad manners of the latter ^{[1 ]} .

In the spring of 1918, the imperial family and all those who were with it were transferred to the rations of soldiers. The deportees and their guards were not ready for such a turn of events; they had to buy all their life supplies at their own expense, which was not enough. The head of the guard, E. G. Kobylinsky, at first managed to get loans for the maintenance of prisoners and the guard, but over the months after the Bolsheviks came to power, loans were reluctant. Then the exiled themselves decided to reduce the staff of servants. The dismissed were paid a salary two months in advance and paid the fare to their places of residence. The rest were offered to make deductions from their salary. Without exception, everyone agreed to this: some in the amount of the whole, half of the salary. Already on the third day after this, some of the released employees left. Others remained for some time in Tobolsk ^[1] .

He accompanied the royal children when moving them from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg . Upon arrival in Yekaterinburg, right at the railway station, among several other servants and ranks of the retinue, he was separated from the tsar’s children and placed in the political department of the Yekaterinburg prison. In the same cell with Volkov were General I. I. Tatishchev, who was arrested at the same time as his retinue and was released from service in the Ipatiev House due to illness, the sovereign's valet T.I. Chemodurov , whom the commissars did not take to the station, but to the prison upon leaving the Ipatiev House. During the evacuation of red Yekaterinburg, he was taken to Perm. Volkov recalled that he and two other prisoners, as well as the empress’s servants - A.V. Gendrikov and E.A. Schneider - were taken to the railway station by cab, and the guard escaped for a long time to search for the prison carriage. There was a great opportunity to escape, but both sick women, one of whom was already not young, refused to run. Volkov did not dare to leave them, fearing revenge on women by the jailers if he only escaped. Servants Alexandra Fedorovna rode in the same wagon carriage with the Serbian princess Elena Petrovna and members of the mission of the Serbian embassy (Major Michić, soldiers Milan Bozic and Abramovich, mission secretary S.N. Smirnov ), who arrived to rescue the first from arrest, and were also arrested ^{[1 ]} .

He was detained in the political department of a Perm prison. On the night of September 3–4, 1918, without charge, as a hostage, among a group of 11 hostages (6 women and 5 men) he was put to execution, which they planned to do on irrigation fields ( sewage fields) on the 5th verst Siberian tract. Sentenced to death, the guards, led by the commander, dressed in sailor uniform , were told that they were being led to a transit prison. On the way, all the arrestees carried their belongings themselves, but, after walking four versts on the highway, turned off the highway to the cesspools, where the guards suddenly began to kindly offer to carry things - apparently, each of them tried to seize the things of the arrested in advance, so that later they would not have to share them with others. Volkov, guessing that he was destined for death, decided to run away. Taking advantage of the darkness and proximity of the forest, Volkov was able to escape from the escorts who shot after him, but missed. Already from the forest Volkov heard rifle volleys - it was the guards who shot the remaining hostages ^[3] .

After escaping, he hid for 1½ months in the nearby forests, trying to cross the front line and enter the territory controlled by anti-Bolshevik forces . I went into villages along the way, whose inhabitants sympathized with him and shared shelter and food with him. In the end, having safely crossed the front line, he returned to white Yekaterinburg, where funeral services had already been held along Volkov, since he was considered to be shot. Then he gave evidence to a member of the court Sergeyev, who was then conducting an inquiry about the murder of the royal family , after which he returned to Tobolsk to the family that remained there. In September 1919, in Omsk, he testified to investigator A. N. Sokolov , who continued this investigation ^[1] .

After evacuation from Omsk in the winter of 1919-1920, he arrived in Harbin , where General D. L. Horvath helped Volkov get a job on the CER . In 1922 he moved with his family to Estonia ^[1] .

On October 16, 2009, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation decided to rehabilitate 52 close relatives of the imperial family who were repressed, including A. A. Volkov ^[4] .

Alexey Andreevich Volkov died in Estonia on February 27, 1929, in Yuryev (Tartu). He was buried in the Assumption Cemetery, his second wife, Evgenia Reyngoldovna, nee von der Hoven (1880-1932), was buried nearby.

While in exile, he wrote memoirs about his service with the imperial family, published in 1928 in Paris. Researchers rated the book as an important source of information about the imperial family being in exile and the fate of people from the royal circle who voluntarily followed their patrons to Siberia and Yekaterinburg. In a brief introduction, Volkov wrote: “Now, looking back, I cannot reproach myself for serving the Tsar’s family in her happy days, I turned my back on her in the days of her calamities. Consciousness of this gives me peace of mind. And I will be happy if my memories help restore the true meek appearance of Emperor Nicholas II and cleanse the memory of his wife and innocent children from slander and malice ” ^[1] .

• Near the royal family. - Paris, 1928.
• Near the royal family . - M .: Private company Ankor, 1993. - 224 p. - 100,000 copies. - ISBN 5-85664-064-0 -1.

• Chernova O. V. Faithful. About those who did not betray the Royal Martyrs. - M .: Russian chronograph, 2010 .-- 576 p. - 6000 copies. - ISBN 5-85134-123-8 .
• Chernova O. V. Faithful to death. On the loyal subjects of the Sovereign. - SPb. : Satis, 2007 .-- 171 p. - ISBN 978-5-7868-0081-6 .