Kolya Derevenko

Who was Kolya Derevenko?

Nikolai "Kolya" Vladimirovich Derevenko (1906-1999) was the son of the court physician of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, and the best friend of Nicholas's son, the Tsarevich Aleksey Nikolaevich.

Nikolai Vladimirovich Derevenko was born in 1906 in the Russian Empire. His father, Vladimir Nikolaevich Derevenko was a surgeon who served at the court of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia. After Nicholas abdicated the throne in March 1917, Kolya and his father voluntarily accompanied the Emperor and his family into exile in the Siberia village of Tobolsk that August. In May 1918 the Derevenkos accompanied the Imperial Family when they were moved to the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, although they stayed in a house across the street.

The Imperial family and four retainers were murdered by order of the Bolshevik government on the night of 16/17 July 1918, one week after which Yekaterinburg was captured by the anti-Bolshevik White Army, as part of the ongoing Russian Civil War. By the end of the year, the Bolshevik Red Army recaptured the city and the Derevenkos relocated to the White Army stronghold of Perm, which in turn fell to the Reds in 1919. The family then moved to Tomsk, and lived a normal life there until the early 1930s, when Kolya's father was arrested by the NKVD.

Kolya fled to Prague and thereafter to Canada, where he built a career as an engineer. He is known to have spoken publicly only once of his time with the Imperial family—in an interview with Edvard Radzinsky during the 1990s.[1]

He died in 1999, at the age 93.