by Greg King
Stillachhaus Sanatorium, Oberstdorf, Bavaria (Anna Anderson [as Anastasia Tchaikovsky]: June 25, 1926–March 1, 1927)
West End Hospital, Berlin (Anna Anderson [as Anastasia Tchaikovsky]: periodically 1922–1925)
Introduction
In the early morning hours of Wednesday, July 17, 1918, muffled gunshots sounded from the basement of an ornate mansion in the Siberian city of Ekaterinburg. Twenty minutes later, a truck rumbled out of the courtyard, passing through the sleeping city and disappearing into a nearby dark forest. In the bed of the truck, hidden beneath a stretch of canvas, lay a grotesque and bloody jumble of corpses, the earthly remains of the last Russian Imperial Family and four servants, executed by the Bolsheviks.
The bullets that morning ended the 304-year-old Romanov Dynasty, which had ruled Russia from 1613 until the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917. But the end of one chapter in history also marked the beginning of another, a chapter comprised of a new mythology that shrouded the events of that July night in a veil of intrigue. The fate of Nicholas II’s youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia, became one of the twentieth century’s greatest, most romantic, and most enduring mysteries. A mystery because, for most of that century, there were no Romanov corpses to prove their deaths, only a theory that the bodies of the victims had been chopped up, burned, and dissolved in acid by their executioners; a mystery because since 1918 there had been persistent rumors that one or more of the Romanovs, and specifically Anastasia, had somehow managed to escape death that night; and a mystery because, in 1991, when the previously unknown Romanov mass grave outside Ekaterinburg was finally exhumed, it was missing the remains of the thirteen-year-old heir to the throne, Tsesarevich Alexei, and one of his sisters, believed by American forensic experts to be those of Anastasia. And a mystery because, in 1920, a battered, psychologically damaged young woman had been rescued from a Berlin canal, a woman who later declared that she was Anastasia.
This was Anna Anderson. The claim invested her in a mantle of tortured enchantment, embodying the coming traumas of the twentieth century while evoking a vanished empire of pomp and privilege. She was not the first, nor would she be the last, royal claimant in history, but, uniquely, Anderson’s claim transformed her into a living legend. Books, magazines, and newspapers diligently chronicled her adventures, offering the world a modern fairy tale gone horribly awry, a tragic princess who miraculously survived war, revolution, and the brutal execution of her family, only to be denied the most basic of all human rights: an identity. Grand dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses, aristocrats and courtiers—they all became embroiled in a mystery that cast son against mother, husband against wife, and caused deep divisions among Europe’s remaining royal families. Actresses Ingrid Bergman, Lili Palmer, Julie Harris, Amy Irving, and Meg Ryan portrayed her onscreen and gave her voice, transforming the least important of Nicholas and Alexandra’s children into the most famous of all Russian princesses, creating a myth so powerfully appealing to imagination that it persists today. Even President John F. Kennedy was so fascinated with her story that he once cornered the real Anastasia’s cousin at a White House state dinner to grill her on the case. Anderson’s claim and the fate of Anastasia, he said, was the “only aspect of Russian history” that he found interesting.1
The idea that Anastasia had miraculously survived the brutal execution in Ekaterinburg burst upon a world traumatized by a decade of tragedies that marked the passing of the old order: the sinking of the Titanic, the horrors of the First World War, the fall of dynasties, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the threat of communism. However unlikely, it spoke to natural human optimism, to the desire that somehow, Bolshevik bullets had failed to destroy an entire family. That for decades it captured international imaginations undoubtedly owed something to the almost unbelievable universe of opulent privilege that was, until 1917, the world of the Romanovs. In this sweeping epic, the public discovered a drama of mythological proportions: a glittering lost kingdom; the tragic love story of Nicholas and Alexandra; the young hemophiliac heir to the throne, destined never to reign; four beautiful young daughters in flowing white dresses and picture hats, frozen for eternity in haunting photographs and flickering newsreels; the malevolent peasant Gregory Rasputin; a tumultuous revolution; a brutal, bloody mass murder; and a former ruling family, scattered by war and struggling to adjust in an unfamiliar world. The narrative that emerged in the wake of Anderson’s claim wedded the romanticism of a faded Edwardian past with the travails of the modern era, Greek tragedy and traditional fairy tale, transcending a realm of dispassionate fact to become legend.
Before the Revolution, Anastasia had been an insignificant princess, her life spent behind protective palace walls; her presumed death in 1918 wrapped her in a mantle of martyrdom, slaughtered at the hands of the Bolshevik regime. A surviving Anastasia, though, particularly for many of the highly impressionable émigrés who fled Russia after the Revolution, represented a figurative and literal rallying point for monarchist sentiments and hopes. Anderson’s claim fell upon an audience left battered by upheaval and deprivation, loss of families, loss of positions, loss of fortunes, and loss of country—the very elements her tale so powerfully embodied. Those who accepted and those who rejected Anderson did so for many reasons, but all had been touched by the traumatic events in Russia. Those favorable often came filled with hope and saw her through eyes moist with influential, nostalgic tears; many on the opposite side denied the possibility that the ill and emotionally unstable woman could be Anastasia, and denounced her on the presumption that it was simply impossible for anyone to have survived the Bolshevik firing squad. The struggle of Anderson’s claim reflected the struggle among the surviving Romanovs, royal relatives in Europe, émigrés, and the world at large to make sense of a complex tragedy, to find in the chaos of war and revolution some glimmer of hope, some hint of mercy, some proof that goodness still existed on the horizon of a new day.
The idea of miraculous survival from Ekaterinburg played upon this psychological need. Anna Anderson appeared at a moment in history when emotions were still raw and little was known. Silence by Soviet authorities, the fact that investigators never found any Romanov corpses, persistent rumors of escape and rescue—for Anderson all of it coalesced into a powerful alliance that surrounded her with an aura of plausibility. For most of the twentieth century, history had only a theory—and, as time proved, a largely erroneous one—of what had happened to the bodies of the imperial family. Conflicting reports, picked up and repeated by officers, foreign diplomats, and journalists, had the Romanovs evacuated from Ekaterinburg to Poland, to Germany, to the Vatican, or to the Far East; Alexandra and her daughters, it was said, were hiding in remote convents, or were prisoners in Siberia. Stories from those who believed that the Romanovs were dead were often equally absurd, including tales that Nicholas II’s severed head was on display under a glass dome somewhere in the Kremlin. The paucity of fact, of actual, physical evidence, allowed imaginations to run wild. If, during her lifetime, Anderson and her supporters could never successfully prove that she was Anastasia, neither could her opponents prove that she was not. For most of the world, supporters and opponents alike, acceptance or rejection of her claim owed less to evidence than to the subjective intangibles of personal belief.
Perhaps some émigrés were so susceptible to the story because it not only echoed Orthodoxy’s mystical belief in miracles but also events in Russia’s past. Far from being a Western phenomenon, mysterious claimants and tales of royal survival peppered the pages of Russian history. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, three men appeared in quick succession, each claiming to be Dimitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. In 1591, nine-year-old Dimitri had died while under house arrest in an isolated Russian village; although officially he was said to have accidentally stabbed himself in the throat, many believed that Boris Gudunov, his uncle by marriage and regent for Dimitri’s brother Feodor, had ordered the young prince killed to pave
his own way to the throne. Soon enough, there were rumors that Dimitri, fearing for his safety, had faked his death and gone into hiding, waiting for the moment to return and lead the country.
The first of the False Dimitris, as this trio of impostors was called, appeared in 1600, two years after Boris Gudunov proclaimed himself tsar. The claimant, who was roughly the correct age and seemed to resemble the supposedly dead Dimitri, insisted that his mother had smuggled him to the safety of a remote monastery. Gudunov denounced him as a young monk named Gregory Otrepyev and ordered his arrest, but the alleged prince escaped to Poland. A few years later, backed by Polish and Baltic aristocrats, the self-proclaimed Dimitri invaded Russia at the head of an army. Gudunov died in 1605; in the chaos that followed, powerful boyars—members of Russia’s aristocracy—murdered Gudunov’s son and swore loyalty to the invader, proclaiming him Tsar Dimitri IV. The patriarch of Moscow, citing the young man’s supposedly intimate knowledge of court life and regal bearing, blessed his cause, and even Dimitri’s own mother embraced the impostor as her son. The new tsar, however, quickly alienated his supporters: attempts to strip the boyars of their power eroded their allegiance, and his marriage to a Polish Catholic woman named Marina Mniszech antagonized Orthodox Moscow. In 1606, Dimitri was overthrown and killed, his body burned, and his ashes fired from a cannon west, toward Poland.
The second False Dimitri appeared a year later. He seems to have been the son of a priest and, like his predecessor, impressed those whom he met with his knowledge of court life. In a truly bizarre twist, Marina Mniszech, widow of the first False Dimitri, promptly recognized the second as her dead husband, even though the two men bore no resemblance to each other. Drawing on a contingent of dissatisfied peasants and Cossacks, and financed by Polish and Lithuanian aristocrats, the new Dimitri laid siege to Moscow. When this failed and his foreign mercenaries revolted, Dimitri—with Marina in tow—fled to the town of Kostroma, where, in December 1610, he was killed by one of his guards. Fewer than four months passed before the third and last False Dimitri surfaced, declaring himself tsar in March 1612 with the support of Cossack troops. By this time, however, Russia had grown weary of such intrigues, and the newest Dimitri was arrested and executed in Moscow. Within a year, Russia was saved from such uncertainties when a group of boyars offered the crown to Ivan the Terrible’s great-nephew by marriage. In July 1613, the sixteen-year-old boy was crowned as Tsar Michael, and the House of Romanov, which was to rule the country until the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, was born.
More than a century later, Catherine the Great, who had come to the throne in a coup that deposed and killed her husband, Peter III, faced two impostors. In 1772, a young woman named Elizabeth Tarakanova appeared in Paris, claiming to be the secret daughter of Peter III’s aunt Empress Elizabeth. Disturbed by her growing notoriety, Catherine dispatched Alexei Orlov, her former lover and one of the men involved in Peter III’s assassination, to seduce and then kidnap her. Arrested in Italy, Tarakanova was hauled back to Russia, but died in prison before she could be tried.
Tarakanova caused little more than a ripple among cognoscenti of St. Petersburg’s ruling elite, but the same could not be said for Emelyan Pugachev. The son of a Don Cossack, Pugachev took advantage of widespread discontent among Russian peasants and declared himself Peter III in 1773, claiming miraculous escape from the deadly machinations of his evil “wife.” Although Pugachev looked nothing like the dead emperor, and was, in fact, illiterate, he convinced a great number of followers in his native Volga region, among them peasants, Cossacks, religious figures, and Orthodox schismatics known as Old Believers. His ever-expanding army swept through the countryside, terrorizing opponents and promising rewards of land, money, and freedom to those who aided his endeavor. Catherine launched an expeditionary force, and after several disastrous turns, Pugachev’s own men handed him over. Taken to Moscow in a cage, he was publicly executed by being quartered the following year.2
And at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this penchant for intrigue, this taste for mystery, repeated itself in the tale of Feodor Kuzmich. In 1836, eleven years after the sudden death of the fatalistic emperor Alexander I, Kuzmich appeared in Siberia as a wandering religious pilgrim. He supposedly possessed an extraordinary knowledge of Catherine the Great, of life at the imperial court, of political affairs, and of the 1812 war against Napoleon, knowledge said to be beyond the capabilities of a humble peasant. At times, according to stories, letters arrived at his hut from the imperial court, along with important visitors from St. Petersburg; even before his death in 1864, it was whispered that he was, in fact, Alexander I, grown weary of the throne and responsible for faking his own demise. Rumor jelled into legend when Alexander I’s tomb was supposedly opened and found to be empty.3
These stories shared some remarkably similar characteristics with the tale of Anna Anderson. Deaths were mysterious, corpses were missing, and intrigue surrounded their ultimate fates. Evidence was muddled, offering contradictory paths that seemed viable to both those who believed and those who did not. Much was often made of supposed aristocratic bearing and manner, while alleged intimate knowledge lent such claims a seeming patina of truth. Questionable “recognitions” were often accepted as evidence, despite the numerous difficulties they posed, and troubling issues were often dismissed.
Unlike her predecessors, Anna Anderson benefited by appearing at a time when her claim could be promoted on a universal scale, through magazines, books, newsreels, films, and documentaries. A legend was created, a complex, multilayered myth appealing to nostalgic sentiment, to romantic hopes, to imagination; a legend so compelling, so widespread that it became part of twentieth-century history and culture. “Whoever she was,” wrote one Romanov relative, “Anna Anderson was no simple impostor.”4 And this was true; even those opposed to her claim had to acknowledge that there was something special about Anna Anderson. Anastasia or not, she managed something quite extraordinary: alone of all royal claimants, she became an almost inextricable part of the Romanov story, a shadowy character destined to forever haunt the tale of Nicholas and Alexandra, a figure of historical importance in her own right.
And unlike other pretenders who came and went, appearing in a burst of publicity, only to be unmasked as clumsy frauds, Anderson seemed to be a genuine enigma. Far from receding into obscurity, she became celebrated, the sheer persistence and duration of her claim lending it a special aura of plausibility. From the autumn of 1921, when she first declared that she was Anastasia, until her death in 1984 and beyond, Anderson’s tale refused to die, a modern fairy tale enacted in grim hospital wards and private asylums, sprawling estates and ancient castles, across Germany and in America. Her legal battle to prove that she was the grand duchess spanned more than thirty years—the longest trial in German history—and stretched to include hundreds of witnesses and thousands of pages of testimony. Even Romanovs, European royalty, and former courtiers recognized her as Anastasia—an impressive array of supporters if she was merely an obvious fraud.
An obvious fraud she certainly wasn’t, nearly everything seemed to declare. It was what made her claim so intriguingly possible: Anderson was the same height as the diminutive Anastasia and, like her, suffered from a foot condition called hallux valgus; then there were her eyes—“unforgettable blue-gray eyes,” recorded one of her supporters, that reminded so many of Nicholas II.5 When pulled from a Berlin canal in 1920, runs the history of her claim, Anderson’s body was covered with “many lacerations” and numerous scars, including a triangular-shaped wound through her right foot, a wound said to match exactly the shape of the bayonet blades used by the Bolsheviks during Russia’s Civil War—mute evidence, her supporters insisted, that she had been severely wounded during the Ekaterinburg massacre.6 What impostor could be so lucky?
Or take languages, convincing, compelling evidence that Anderson was Anastasia, as the legend noted. She most often refused to speak Russian, though clearly she understood the language; yet she
spoke it in her sleep “with good pronunciation,” said a doctor, and her voice carried a “typical Russian accent.”7 Princess Xenia Georgievna, Anastasia’s cousin and a woman who believed that Anderson was the grand duchess, was said to have called it “perfectly acceptable Russian, from the point of view of St. Petersburg society.”8 Under anesthesia, ran the stories, she “raved in English” and possessed what one lady described as “the clearest and best English accent.”9 And, recorded one journalist, “Her French pronunciation was perfect.”10 If she was an impostor, Anderson’s supporters pointed out, she must have been a very skillful and carefully prepared impostor to manage such a linguistic feat.
How could an impostor amass the wealth of intimate details about Anastasia’s life? people argued. Would an impostor know enough trivial details, as Anderson did, about former wounded officers who had convalesced in Anastasia’s hospital at Tsarskoye Selo to not only answer questions, and answer them accurately, but also to correct deliberate inaccuracies and—impressively—to recall a nickname the grand duchess had once bestowed on an obscure colonel?11 Would an impostor break into tears of recognition, as Anderson was said to have done, upon hearing an obscure waltz that had been played for the grand duchesses?12 Or know the intricacies of imperial etiquette so well that she never made a mistake in behavior, never a lapse in manner? Or convince anthropological experts that she was Anastasia? Or handwriting experts? And on and on it went—this string of unlikely coincidences, if they could be called that, that peppered the history of Anderson’s claim, that raised her from simple impostor to possible, plausible, even likely, said some, grand duchess.
This catalog of evidence reaches a kind of crescendo with the October 1925 encounter between Anderson and Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Anastasia’s favorite aunt. After three days, Olga left Berlin, left, said one of the claimant’s supporters, with words impossible to ignore: “My intelligence will not allow me to accept her as Anastasia, but my heart tells me that it is she. And since I have grown up in a religion that taught me to follow the dictates of the heart rather than those of the mind, I am unable to leave this unfortunate child.”13 And she followed this with letters—“You are not alone now, and we shall not abandon you,” promised one.14