Alexis P. Boodberg author page

When crosswords were invented in 1913, Alexis P. Boodberg seemed an unlikely candidate to construct them someday. At the time, he was a 43-year old officer in the Russian Imperial Army, stationed in Vladivostok in East Asia. It was the eve of World War I and he was soon deployed to Europe as a commander on the Eastern Front. Then, in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he served as the Minister of Defense in an ill-fated White Army campaign against the Bolsheviks. Facing defeat, and the risk of imprisonment or execution, he fled his homeland. In 1921, he emigrated to the United States, where he lived until passing away in 1945.

Throughout his life in exile, he wrote extensively about his wartime experiences and international affairs. He also pursued the less weighty subject of puzzles. In the 1930s, he noted the "peaceful contentment" of solving a word scramble game, in contrast to his prior life of "deciphering [the] enemy's plans and stratagems on the battlefields of several wars."

His interest in puzzles led to constructing. In 1942, the inaugural year of the Times crossword, he had two puzzles published. In all, he had four in the Times.

His ties to Russia were evident in his crossword entries, which included VLADIVOSTOK (Russian naval seaport), SPASSK (Great airfield 125 miles north of Vladivostok), ROSTOV ("The oil spigot of Russia"), MURMANSK (Great arctic convoy port), TSARITSYN (Stalingrad, 25 years ago), TSARINA (Queen ___), MOSCOW (Former capital of Russian czars), and many others.

He ranks highly in several Times crossword "all-time" categories. He was the earliest-born constructor, born six months before J.C. Doesburg, the only other Times constructor born before 1870 (according to current data). He was also one of the first foreign-born Times constructors to be published and one of the first whose native language was not English. His first Times puzzle appeared when he was 73, placing him among the oldest to debut.

Baron Aleksei Pavlovich von Budberg was born in 1869 into an aristocratic family long loyal to the Russian monarchy. (In the U.S., he referred to himself as Alexis P. Boodberg). As a youth, he attended an elite military school in his hometown of Oryol, Russia. He then served in premier armed forces units before entering the Russian Academy of the General Staff, a school in St. Petersburg for training young officers for top positions in the Tsar's military.

Upon graduating in 1895, he was stationed in the empire's East Asian region. According to one account, Tsar Nicholas II congratulated the young officer on finishing at the top of his class and suggested he stay in St. Petersburg at the central command. But Boodberg replied that his hope was to be deployed in the tumultuous eastern territories. His request was granted and he spent nearly 20 years in East Asia, where he was active in the Russo-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion. His duties also included overseeing the massive fortresses around Vladivostok, the empire's most strategic city on the Pacific and the eastern point of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

When World War I broke out, he returned to Europe, where he served as a lieutenant-general in Russia's assault on the Eastern Front. One of his obituaries credited this Russian campaign with saving Paris, presumably by consuming German forces that otherwise may have broken through on the Western Front.

During the Russian Civil War in the late teens, he sided with the White Army against the Bolsheviks. He returned east to Siberia and served as the Minister of War under the White leader Alexander Kolchak. As the Whites were collapsing, and not long before Kolchak was executed, Baron Boodberg fled the country. He first went to Manchuria and then Japan. From there, in 1921, he emigrated with his wife and two of his children to the United States. He was separated from his two other children, both young adults, but they were able to reach the U.S. later in 1921.

In exile, the family initially settled in Menlo Park, California, where Baron Boodberg operated a Russian tea room. In 1925, they moved to San Francisco, where the family opened another tea room.

Fluent in English, Baron Boodberg lectured and wrote extensively on world affairs, including a 1921 piece entitled "What Would Happen if Japan Attacked America" in a New York Times monthly.

Throughout his exile, he was openly critical of the Soviet government and lamented the loss of the Russia he knew. In 1938, he was a featured speaker at a tribute to the Russian monarchy on the 20th anniversary of the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

In 1939, he won a $2,000 prize in a San Francisco Chronicle word game contest. The game, called "Scramagems," was similar to Scrabble. He tied for first, and was declared the winner based on his essay about his interest in the game:

After many years spent in puzzling over fate's cryptograms on the battlefield of life, and in deciphering [the] enemy's plans and stratagems on the battlefields of several wars, I found peaceful contentment in the harmless pursuit of solving The Chronicle's "Scramagems."

First, with small arms — my pencil and paper — I engage the enemy at his weakest point.

Then, the heavy dictionary ordinance is brought into play and the battle rages all along the "Scram Line."

Victory at last! One by one the prisoners are trotted off to the answer blank. A great scrap, this bloodless War of Scrams!

Baron Boodberg's wife, Valentina, died in 1933. Of their four children, two sons became professors at U.C.-Berkeley, one in engineering and the other in Asian studies, a discipline the son was credited with pioneering at the university. Their daughter operated the family tea room and another son was an engineer.

Baron Boodberg passed away in 1945, a few months after the Allies, including his homeland under Soviet rule, prevailed in World War II. He was 76.