In Naples, a missive from Russia reached Alexis, bearing the solemn promise of his father’s forgiveness. The Tsarevich had already fled the court and abandoned the realm; he knew full well that his return would place him once more at the mercy of Peter the Great. Yet he returned. Within that fateful resolution lay the heart of the tragedy: the eldest son renounced the crown, but the father could not believe that any renunciation was sufficient to neutralize a rival.
The breach was of long standing. Peter sought to fashion his son into an heir capable of governing an empire transformed by relentless war and sweeping reform. Alexis replied that he possessed neither the health nor the disposition for such a burden. A letter of 1715, cited by Borrow, gave official form to this profound weariness: Alexis formally petitioned to be relieved of the succession, pledging never to advance any claim to it. He likewise surrendered his children to his father, asking only for the means to subsist in obscurity. The document appeared to settle the matter; above all, it revealed a prince desperate to cast off a mantle he deemed himself wholly unfit to bear.
Peter refused this private compromise. He demanded a final, irreversible choice: Alexis must either renounce his rights publicly and retire behind the walls of a monastery, or resume his station in the line of succession by learning the art of statecraft. The son promised a reply. Instead of returning to his father, he slipped out of Russia with a handful of companions, making his way to Vienna and thence to Naples. There, he hoped to find sanctuary from the court. Yet exile resolved nothing: his mere presence abroad became an affair of state, and his retinue only stoked the smoldering suspicions of the Tsar.
In Naples, the Tsar’s emissaries arrived in force: Peter dispatched Privy Councilor Tolstoy and Captain of the Guards Romanov, bearing his imperial letter. The document assured Alexis that he would suffer no punishment if he obeyed and returned, yet warned that he would be cursed as a son and treated as a traitorous subject should he refuse. In Borrow’s view, this solemn pledge rendered his return conceivable; it did nothing, however, to lessen the vast gulf between the sovereign who wrote it and the son who was compelled to believe it. Alexis departed Naples alongside the envoys and journeyed back to Moscow, where the machinery of power was already waiting.
Upon his return in 1718, Alexis formally renounced his rights in favor of his infant half-brother, Peter. He also disclosed the names of those who had aided him in his flight. Yet this imperial pardon did not bring the investigation to a close; rather, his associates and correspondence became the fodder for relentless interrogations.
Though the Tsar’s envoys had promised clemency, Peter demanded, after the very first audiences, that Alexis lay bare the minutest details of his flight and every name among his supporters. The prince was forced to answer not in a father’s private chamber, but before an assembly of ministers and estates of the realm. His private papers were read aloud before this gathering; the authorities then consulted religious, civil, and military statutes to determine what penalties applied. The contemporary record paints Alexis as bewildered and excessively eager to speak. This entire scene has come down to us through the texts preserved in Borrow’s compilation.
Borrow casts these interrogations as the gradual unmasking of a treasonous plot. Alexis admitted to clandestine contacts and indiscreet confidences; wrung from him under the duress of the inquiry, his admissions were systematically turned against his circle. The son who had asked only for the bread of sustenance was now driven to denounce those who had aided him. The historical record does not permit us to establish independently whether the organized conspiracy of which he stood accused ever truly existed.
The drama then shifted from the Tsar’s private apartments to a solemn assembly of judges and dignitaries, convened to pronounce upon Alexis’s guilt and to fix his punishment. His royal blood did not shield him from judgment; on the contrary, it demanded an exemplary end. The verdict was death. Alexis had already laid aside the crown, yet that abdication could not quiet the terror inspired by a living heir—a prince around whom dissidents might rally, and whose very existence embodied an alternate vision for the realm.
The sentence was signed by one hundred and eighty dignitaries, among whom Borrow enumerates ministers, senators, and military officers. The decree maintained that the mere contemplation of rebellion and parricide merited death; it depicted the Tsar as a long-suffering father and Alexis as a peril to the state. The instrument was thus at once a judicial decree and an apology for Peter’s absolute rule. Submitted to the Tsar for sovereign review, the sentence was then read to the prince. Borrow recounts that Alexis collapsed, cried out for his father’s mercy, and could scarcely endure the reading. He also records the lingering rumor that poison had been applied to the parchment itself, though without offering proof. This dramatic moment lends a precise chronology to Alexis’s end, but no certainty as to its cause.
The end came before the sentence could be executed upon a public scaffold. Borrow records that Alexis died in captivity shortly after the judgment was pronounced. Accounts of his final hours diverge, and the exact cause of death remains indeterminate. Contemporary rumors whispered of a violent end; the chronology of Peter the Great established by the École des hautes études en sciences sociales notes that the cause remains unknown. The suspicion of poison persists as mere allegation. The court had ordained death; imprisonment carried Alexis away before the state could stage the spectacle of his execution.
Following his demise, the Tsar commanded that the body lie in state in the Church of the Holy Trinity for three days, displayed in an open casket draped in velvet. The populace came to gaze upon the prince and kiss his hand; thereafter, a solemn cortege bore him to the newly built cathedral within the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he was laid to rest in the imperial vaults. This solemn pomp stood in stark contrast to the dungeon, the trial, and the reading of the sentence. It restored Alexis to his princely rank for the grave, yet it could neither expunge his condemnation nor dispel the mystery surrounding his death.
The chronicle leaves us with a question far larger than the tragic fate of a single prince: at what moment does a private renunciation cease to be a personal choice and transform into a political menace? Alexis fled because he had no desire to rule; Peter demanded his return because an heir could not simply vanish into the shadows. When the son returned, the sovereign converted his private words and acquaintances into capital treason. The imperial pardon had opened the road home, yet offered no shelter to the man who had dared to trust it.