by Greg King
But there were doubts, and they took wing even before the official investigations had ended. Conflicting rumors and the absence of any corpses soon gave rise to tales of escape and survival that spread first across Siberia and then throughout the world. Nicholas II, it was said, had been dragged away, bound in chains, aboard a mysterious train; Alexei supposedly died from fright after a bomb exploded at the Ipatiev House. Stories declared that the entire family had escaped to Japan; that Kaiser Wilhelm II or King George V had forced the Soviet government to hand over their crowned cousins; even that Pope Benedict XV had organized a rescue of the prisoners and granted them asylum in the Vatican. International journalists, military aides, heads of Allied missions in Siberia, intelligence operatives, and diplomats all eagerly seized upon and disseminated the latest rumors with few attempts at verification, creating an impenetrable web of innuendo that only hinted at some great, unknown mystery.
Rumors were kept alive not only by the possibility that one or more of the Romanovs might have escaped and by the absence of any bodies, but also by the appearance of the first claimants in the case. Princess Elena of Serbia, whose Romanov husband was one of those thrown alive down a mine shaft in Alapayevsk, confronted one early claimant in the autumn of 1918, when the Bolsheviks asked her to meet a young woman said to be a rescued Anastasia. Elena denounced her as a fraud, but this was merely the first of many such putative Romanovs.68 Just six months after the presumed execution in Ekaterinburg, a woman hiding in a Siberian convent let it be known that she was really Empress Alexandra; the young boy and girl with her, she said, were Alexei and Anastasia. She attracted a fair amount of local attention before the Bolsheviks exposed her as an impostor.69
A year after the executions, a young man named Alexei Poutziado appeared in Siberia, claiming to be Tsesarevich Alexei. White Army officials at first ignored the story; after learning that collections were being taken on his behalf by worshipful crowds, however, they had him brought to the city of Omsk and arranged for Pierre Gilliard to confront him. “The door of the next room was opened a little,” Gilliard recalled, “and I was able to observe, unknown to him, a boy, taller and stronger than the Tsesarevich, who seemed to me fifteen or sixteen years old. His sailor’s suit, the color of his hair, and the way it was arranged, were all vaguely reminiscent of Alexei Nikolaievich but there the resemblance ended. . . . The boy was introduced to me and I put several questions to him in French: he remained silent. When a reply was insisted upon, he said that he understood everything I had said but had his own reasons for only speaking Russian. I then addressed him in that language. This, too, brought no results.”70 In the end, Poutziado confessed, to the surprise of no one, that he was not the tsesarevich.
The five Hessian siblings during the 1910 visit to Germany. From left: Irene, Princess Heinrich of Prussia; Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig; Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna; Princess Victoria of Battenberg (later Marchioness of Milford Haven); and Empress Alexandra.
Then there were stories that the Bolsheviks had evacuated the empress and her daughters to the Siberian city of Perm. Rudolf Gaida, who headed the Czechoslovak forces that took Ekaterinburg with the Whites in July 1918, launched his own inquiry into the Romanov case. This uncovered tales, often of Bolshevik origin, in which “witnesses” had encountered the empress and her daughters, caught fleeting glimpses by candlelight of supposed grand duchesses, and even a doctor who claimed that he had treated a battered Anastasia after she had been captured following an escape attempt.71 None of this was deemed convincing by the White Army—which, after all, hoped to use the dead Romanovs as anti-Bolshevik propaganda—but it did contribute to the growing mythology that surrounded the disappearance and fate of the imperial family.
These early claimants, along with persistent rumors, tangled newspaper reports, and inaccurate diplomatic dispatches, all contributed to the air of uncertainty that hovered over the fate of the Romanovs. In June 1920, Count Paul von Benckendorff, former grand marshal of the imperial court, recorded in his diary, “I am still without definite news with regard to the fate of the Emperor, Empress and their children.”72 A few weeks later, noting the “legends and vague rumors,” he reported the latest story that had the Romanovs hiding in the Vatican.73 In 1922, the empress’s friend Lili Dehn wrote in her memoirs, “From time to time reports of the safety of the Imperial Family have reached us, but the next moment we are faced with evidence that the whole of them have perished. God alone knows the truth, but I still permit myself to hope.”74 And a year later, Anna Vyrubova recorded similar sentiments in her own memoirs:
It is certain that Nicholas II and his family have disappeared behind one of the world’s greatest and most tragic mysteries. With them disappeared all of the suite and the servants who were permitted to accompany them to the house in Ekaterinburg. My reason tells me that it is probable that they were all foully murdered, that they are dead and beyond the sorrows of this life forever. But reason is not always amenable. There are many of us in Russia and in exile who, knowing the vastness of the enormous empire, the remoteness of its communications with the outside world, know well the possibilities of imprisoning in monasteries, in mines, in deep forests from which no news can penetrate. We hope.75
On July 25, 1918—just a week after the presumed executions—King George V attended a memorial service for his cousin Nicholas II in London. “I hear from Russia,” the king wrote in his diary, “that there is every probability that Alicky [Alexandra] and four daughters and little boy were murdered at the same time as Nicky. It’s too horrible and shows what fiends these Bolsheviks are. For poor Alicky, perhaps it was best so. But those poor innocent children!”76 At the time, no one knew quite what to believe. “What has happened to that unfortunate, mistaken Alix, who was in so many ways cause of all your misfortune?” Queen Marie of Romania wondered that fall in a letter to Nicholas’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna. “And is little Alexei still alive? How and where are all the girls?”77
Even as circumstantial evidence of the mass executions accumulated, some relatives, not surprisingly, clung to hope. In the 1920s, wrote Xenia Alexandrovna’s husband, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, he spent a good deal of time “exhausting my supply of logic and patience in talking to my wife, my sister-in-law, and my mother-in-law, who maintained with all the fervor of real devotion that their brother and son Nicky had been rescued.”78 Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, in fact, steadfastly clung to the idea that her son Nicholas II and his family had all escaped execution in Ekaterinburg, a position she held until she died.79
Alexandra’s sister Irene, Princess Heinrich of Prussia, found news of the presumed executions particularly hard to accept. In a letter to Eleonore, second wife of her brother, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse, Irene noted the conflicting stories but seemed resigned to accept the worst. “I can only hope,” she confided, “that the children and Alix died together and unmolested, as they were too beautiful.”80 No one in the empress’s family, though, was more traumatized by the events of 1918 than Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig himself. An artistic, sensitive man, he had been emotionally scarred by the early deaths of his hemophiliac brother and of his mother; his first marriage, arranged by his grandmother Queen Victoria against his wishes, failed miserably and ended in a scandalous divorce; and his only daughter had died of typhoid at age eight while on holiday with Nicholas II and his family. A happy second marriage provided him with two sons, but the grand duke lost his throne in the revolution that drove his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II into exile. For Ernie, as his family called him, the tumult in Russia brought not just the presumed loss of Alexandra and her children, but also of their sister Ella, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, a blow he shared with his remaining sisters but that fell upon a man whose spirit was already bowed by tragedy. So worried was his family about the effect of all this that his wife, Eleonore, conspired with servants and his relatives to deliberately keep devastating reports from Russia from him as long as they could.81
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sp; Others, though, reconciled themselves to the tragedy. In England, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven, Alexandra’s eldest sister, continued to hold out hope through the summer of 1918. Her son Prince Louis, the future Lord Mountbatten, recalled, “How very excited my mother was at the vaguest possibility of one of them having survived the assassination at Ekaterinburg.”82 After King George V told her that early reports confirmed everyone had perished, though, Victoria wrote candidly of her sister Alexandra, “Though her loss is pain & grief to me, yet I am grateful that I can think of her as being at peace now. She, her dear husband & children removed for ever from further suffering.”83 According to Mountbatten, the news, in retrospect, had seemed inevitable: “We were expecting it to take place, we had no reason to doubt it; and there may not have been any proof, but they in those days were not requiring proof. What else could we believe but the worst?”84
PART TWO
ANNA ANDERSON
5
Resurrection
Darkness came early to Berlin on Tuesday, February 17, 1920. By the time Berliners spilled from bureaucratic offices and crowded factories and into the streets, the late winter night had already come to the city. The city was cold, though the seemingly incessant snow of the past few days had finally stopped, replaced by intermittent rain and sleet. It was the biting wind, a chill phantom that swept over the great squares and down urban canyons lined by apartment blocks, that seemed so cold, catching anyone unlucky enough to be out that evening in its determined and icy grasp.
Perhaps the cold somehow seemed more pervasive in light of the struggles through which Berlin had suffered. Just a little over five years had passed since that seemingly glorious, golden summer of 1914, when its two million citizens had enjoyed the sights and sounds of peace and prosperity as a rush of carriages, motorcars, and electric trams endlessly circled the city’s broad avenues and magisterial monuments.1 Bakeries and restaurants had spilled their enticing odors into the streets, where students in school uniforms pushed past fur-wrapped dowagers and top-hatted bureaucrats. Workers and merchants sat at the sidewalk cafés and dance halls of the Tiergarten, filling their stomachs with potatoes, sauerkraut, sausages, bread, and beer, or enjoying the newsreels and comedy shorts that flickered across cinema screens.
Then came August 1914, when Kaiser Wilhelm II declared war on Russia, and Berlin had been swept along in a sudden rush of patriotism. Jubilant crowds had thronged the streets, waving flags and handkerchiefs as troops paraded down the Unter den Linden to the strains of the national anthem. “Life in the Germany of today,” recorded one witness, “seems to move to the rhythm of this tune. Every day troops pass by my window on their way to the station, and as they march along to this refrain, people rush to the windows and doors of the houses and take up the song so that it rings through the streets, almost like a solemn vow sung by these men on their way to death.”2
The months passed, and as hopes for a quick victory faded, the inevitable effects of conflict had slowly, invidiously crept across the German capital. With winter came rationing of food, fuel, and even textiles, as a British naval blockade attempted to starve the Germans into submission and stores ran short of basic supplies. “A deep-seated discontent animated the masses of the population throughout the first winter of the war,” recalled one member of the Reichstag.3 One Berlin resident wrote that the city appeared to be “enveloped in an impenetrable veil of sadness, gray in gray, which no golden ray of sunlight ever seems able to pierce, and which forms a fit setting for the white-faced, black-robed women who glide so sadly through the streets, some bearing their sorrow proudly as a crown to their lives, others bent and broken under a burden too heavy to be borne.”4 Rationing took hold and strangled the city in increasing despair. First the bread ran out, then potatoes; people cut slabs from horses that had fallen from cold and exhaustion in the streets and fed the meat to their starving families. Electricity was inconsistent and heating was unreliable. Thousands stood in food lines through the night, through rain and snow, suffering from cholera and typhus that swelled into epidemics.5
After four agonizing years of war, Berlin had slid into chaos. By the autumn of 1918, streets were almost entirely devoid of motorcars for lack of fuel, and the sidewalks were filled with “heart-broken women,” deprivation firmly etched in “faces like masks, blue with cold and drawn with hunger.”6 Strikes and demonstrations filled the great squares, eyed with unease by bands of mounted police who patrolled the city day and night.7 The uncertainty and discontent had finally erupted the first week of November, as rioters took to the streets and shots rang out from barricades manned by both loyalists and by rebels sporting red flags.8 Revolution was on every tongue. Having lost the support of his people and of his military, Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated, escaping to the relative safety of an exile in Holland to avoid the fate that had befallen his Romanov cousins in Russia earlier that summer.
The fragile Weimar Republic had managed to reestablish some semblance of order over a Berlin that swelled in these years with thousands of dispossessed and distraught Russian émigrés. In the years immediately following the Russian Revolution, and not without a bit of irony given the four years of intense hatred and armed conflict that had just ended, Berlin became home to some fifty thousand tsarist émigrés.9 “At every step,” recorded one historian, “you could hear Russian spoken. Dozens of Russian restaurants were opened—with balalaikas, with gypsies, pancakes,” all the trappings expected of this bit of refugee St. Petersburg.10 These émigrés worshipped in Russian Orthodox cathedrals and churches; read their own newspapers and periodicals; ran their own cafés, bookstores, and shops; distributed aid through their own charities; and mourned the passing of the old order in the privacy of their own clubs.11
An atmosphere of intrigue and hope dominated the Russian émigré community in Berlin. In their struggles, they keenly followed developments in Russia, and the latest stories concerning the fate of the imperial family. “All our conversation still turned around one subject—the past,” recalled Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna. “This past was like a dusty diamond, which we held to the light in the hope of seeing the sun rays playing through it. We spoke of the past, we looked to it.”12 Scattered from their homeland in a cataclysmic diaspora, former tsarist generals drove taxicabs, once-proud countesses served as maids, elegant courtiers waited tables in crowded cafés, and dispossessed princesses acted as tutors. Most accepted the loss of titles, positions, fortunes, and country with an almost disconcerting resignation, echoing the deeply ingrained Russian belief in sudba, an inescapable, inexorable fate. Yet many of these émigrés, even the most pragmatic, clung to their vanished past, convinced that soon all they had lost would be restored: that the fledgling Bolshevik regime would collapse; that once again they would live in their looted palaces and estates; and that their wealth and positions would be restored in a resurgent Russian Empire guided by the twin powers of Orthodoxy and monarchy.
But on that Tuesday night in February 1920, most Berliners, natives and émigrés alike, had gratefully retreated into their houses, apartments, or temporary hotel rooms, and by nine the snow-banked streets were largely deserted. A few trams rumbled along the main avenues, passing beneath the ghostly halos that ringed strings of streetlights stretching into the darkness, but Berlin was nothing if not a creature of habit, and those habits—prim, proudly Protestant, and dominated by the Prussian love of regularity and order—drove most of its citizens toward their beds. It was, after all, a typical winter weeknight, and a weeknight before the frenzied and cosmopolitan cafés and cabarets that became hallmarks of Weimar Berlin had taken hold.
A police officer, a certain Sergeant Hallman, happened to be on patrol that evening, on a route just west of the city center that took him to an area of darkened government offices. As he turned along the spidery length of the Landwehr Canal, he heard a splash. His light swept over the graceful, arched iron bridge spanning the canal and into the dark waters below, where it picked out a strugg
ling figure. Hallman raced over the granite embankment and pulled a young woman to safety.13 The sergeant quickly appraised the situation. The woman was small, with dark hair, and seemed to be in her twenties. She wore a black wool skirt, black stockings, a light-colored linen blouse, high black boots, and a heavy plaid wool shawl, all completely soaked, but a quick look revealed no obvious injuries.14
Hallman asked her name and what had happened, but the woman refused to speak. He could not leave her—he had no idea how she had ended up in the canal, and in any case, if she continued to sit out in the cold night she would undoubtedly freeze to death. The sergeant hurried her down the street and around the corner, to the Elisabeth Hospital on the Lützowstrasse, handing the young woman off to medical staff. Although doctors and nurses questioned her, she would say nothing. Examination showed that she was suffering from nothing more immediately serious than the cold, and after changing into a dry gown she was given a temporary bed for the night, booked into the common ward as “Fraulein Unbekannt,” or “Miss Unknown.”15