by Greg King
According to von Kleist, Fraulein Annie twice stated that she traveled to the German capital alone, although she later claimed that she had been accompanied by Serge Tchaikovsky.44 Arriving in Berlin, she told Zenaide Tolstoy that she took a room in a small boardinghouse on Friedrichstrasse, close to a train station, but could not recall the name of the establishment, although to others she would later claim to remember nothing of her time in the city.45 “I intended,” she told Baron von Kleist, “to live hidden for fear of the pursuers, and to earn a living by working.”46 She had hoped, she would later say, to somehow gain an audience with Princess Irene of Prussia.47
It was either on that first evening in Berlin or a week later (she insisted upon both as correct) that Fraulein Annie made her suicide attempt.48 She usually admitted to this, calling it her “greatest folly.”49 She told one doctor that as she lay alone in her hotel room, the enormity of her hopeless situation overwhelmed her and she feared going to see Princess Irene because then “everyone would know her shame, that she had borne her common rescuer’s child, and that he was somewhere in Romania.” This, she declared, led her to throw herself into the Landwehr Canal.50 But if Peuthert is to be believed, the claimant told her that soon after arriving in Berlin, she realized she was being followed. One night, she was pulled into a passing car and drugged; those who kidnapped her removed her clothing and dressed her as a worker before pulling alongside the Landwehr Canal and casting her, half conscious, into the water.51
Such was the rescue tale Fraulein Annie related, a complex tangle of fantastic elements and contradictions that did nothing to advance its credibility. Seemingly implausible, it gained an aura of possibility when, shortly after passing through the émigré community and appearing in print, rumors and assertions emerged that apparently supported the tale. Starting in the late 1920s, the claimant’s supporters marshaled statements and gossip suggesting that Anastasia had survived the massacre. Franz Svoboda, an Austrian prisoner of war in Ekaterinburg at the time of the executions, said that he happened to be passing the Ipatiev House early on the morning of July 17, 1918, when he heard muffled gunshots; running into the courtyard, he “saw a soldier turning over a woman’s body; she screamed, and the soldier struck her on the head with his rifle butt.” Svoboda said that the young woman was not dead and ran for help; along with two unnamed friends, he bundled the injured girl—Anastasia—into a cart and spirited her to a house down the avenue.52 Another man, Heinrich Kleibenzetl, picked up the tale, later saying that he had seen a wounded Anastasia shortly after the execution, being cared for by his landlady near the Ipatiev House.53
Then there were stories from those who had been in Siberia, and from Soviet officials, that one or more of the grand duchesses had escaped; according to one man, the rumors “never ceased to circulate” in Ekaterinburg.54 Several people later alleged that Bolshevik authorities in Ekaterinburg had conducted a house-to-house search, looking for a missing imperial daughter, and told of posters offering a reward for her capture.55 Arthur Rohse, a lieutenant in the White Russian Army, recalled “special orders” from the military command to prepare “four fully manned and armored railway carriages,” to be sent across Siberia to find and save a rescued grand duchess.56 In addition to Princess Elena of Serbia, who was shown an early Anastasia claimant by the Bolsheviks in the autumn of 1918, Count Carl Bonde, chief of the Swedish Red Cross in Siberia, recounted how one day in 1918 his private train was “stopped and searched for Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. The Grand Duchess was not aboard the train, however, and no one seemed to know where she had gone.”57
It was an intriguing, seemingly impressive body of evidence that lent credence to what even many of Fraulein Annie’s supporters admitted was a less than credible tale. Somewhat more ambiguous was the claimant’s rescuer, the mysterious Alexander Tchaikovsky. Although no one by this name had served in the guard at the Ipatiev House, the claimant’s supporters assumed that this was a pseudonym. Eventually, they suggested that a Pole named Stanislav Mishkevich—who had indeed been a guard in Ekaterinburg with his brother Nicholas—was the enigmatic Tchaikovsky.58 After Fraulein Annie’s tale was published along with pleas for corroborating information, a man named Constantine Anastasiou came forward, claiming that a Bolshevik soldier from Russia named Stanislav had approached him in Bucharest in the autumn of 1918, saying that he had rescued one of the grand duchesses when the bodies were being transported to the Koptyaki Forest. She had been injured and needed medical treatment, but he was fearful of taking her to any hospital.59 Although this story contradicted the tales of Svoboda and Kleibenzetl, the claimant’s supporters seized upon it as further evidence in her case. Then there was a certain Sarcho Gregorian, who said that on December 5, 1918—the same date on which the claimant supposedly gave birth in Bucharest—several people led by a man fitting Mishkevich’s description had crossed the Dniester River; he remembered this, he said, because he had been told one of them was a rescued grand duchess, and he had been paid for his services with money received from the sale of a string of pearls.60 The Germans occupied Bucharest until the autumn of 1918; many years later, several former intelligence officers testified to hearing secondhand stories of a rescued Anastasia hiding in the city, supposedly under German protection.61
This story took an even more bizarre turn in the spring of 1925 when a man whom one of the claimant’s supporters rather too conveniently described as “a Russian soldier by appearance” arrived at Dalldorf asking about “Fraulein Unbekannt.” Someone directed him to Clara Peuthert, and on seeing a photograph of the claimant, he was said to have burst into tears and exclaimed that she was Anastasia. He left a letter stating that her child had been placed in an orphanage in Romania, and on the back of the photograph wrote, “Anastasia Nikolaievna . . . Alexandereva . . . Ivan . . . Alexev . . . Shorov . . . geb [born] Pittersburg [Petersburg].” The claimant’s supporters suspected that the man was Serge Tchaikovsky, brother of her alleged rescuer and the person said to have accompanied her from Bucharest to Berlin. He disappeared, though, before he could be questioned, and was never seen or heard from again.62
These rumors, stories, and curious twists—it all seemed intriguing, and in January 1926 the claimant’s supporters in Berlin sent a woman named Gertrude Spindler to Bucharest to investigate the story. Her mission was extraordinarily broad: Was there any documentation that Tchaikovsky, Mishkevich, or anyone fitting his description had crossed the Romanian border singularly or with other travelers in 1918 or 1919? Was there any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that the claimant or her alleged rescuers had lived in Bucharest between 1918 and 1920? Was there any religious or civil record of the alleged marriage between the claimant and Tchaikovsky in January 1919? Was there any evidence that her alleged child had been born and baptized in Bucharest? Was there any indication—stories, records, or even press reports—of a man being wounded and killed in a street battle in late 1919 or early 1920, as Fraulein Annie claimed Tchaikovsky had been? And was there any record of Tchaikovsky’s alleged burial in the city? M. V. Pokloevsky-Kozell, the former Russian ambassador to Romania, met Spindler and offered his full cooperation in her quest; additionally, he contacted the Romanian minister of the interior and the director of the State Police, briefed them on the story, and won from them the complete cooperation of the government. A detective was assigned to assist Spindler, and she was given a police motorcar and driver to facilitate her quest. Even the press cooperated, publishing the claimant’s story in the national papers and asking for witnesses or anyone else with information to come forward to aid in the investigation.63
Spindler spent weeks roaming through Bucharest and the surrounding countryside, searching through records and wandering along narrow lanes, from obscure churches to the most impoverished hut, interviewing officials, priests, police, doctors, nurses, and anyone who might offer any evidence supporting Fraulein Annie’s story. She had the advantage of unlimited resources, the cooperation of the government
, and of being on the ground just a few years after the claimant’s supposed stay in Bucharest. But in the end, she uncovered nothing. There was no evidence of any border crossing; nothing to suggest that the claimant or anyone who fit the description of her alleged rescuers had ever been in Bucharest; and no records supporting the claimant’s story of her alleged marriage, the birth and baptism of her alleged son, or the death and burial of her alleged rescuer. Spindler’s only positive achievement came in locating the Bucharest street apparently first suggested by Zenaide Tolstoy as the possible place were the mysterious Tchaikovsky family had lived. This was Sventi Voyevoda, a narrow lane that ran behind a former aristocratic villa in the city.64 But of the Tchaikovskys, the Mishkevichs, the claimant—indeed, anyone who had supposedly lived on the villa’s grounds—Spindler could find nothing.
The Romanian royal family, crowned relatives of the Romanovs, treated rumors about a rescued Anastasia in their capital quite seriously. Queen Marie of Romania took a personal interest in the claimant’s tale and asked that everything be done to accommodate Spindler in her quest.65 And her daughter Princess Ileana told lawyer Brien Horan, “The family did everything within their power to find out if there was any veracity to her claim, but were unable to find any trace of her.”66
And this is how it stood throughout the claimant’s life. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna deemed the story “palpably false. I was convinced then, as I am now, that it is so from beginning to end. Just think of the supposed rescuers vanishing into thin air, as it were! Had Nicky’s daughter been really saved, her rescuers would have known just what it meant to them. Every royal house in Europe would have rewarded them. Why, I am sure that my mother would not have hesitated to empty her jewel box in gratitude. There is not one tittle of genuine evidence in the story.”67
There had, of course, been dozens of rumors about the fate of the Romanovs, second- and thirdhand tales about their presumed executions, stories of their whispered movements aboard mysterious trains, alleged witnesses to their secret captivity in isolated convents, and questionable claims of their miraculous rescue by one or another of their crowned relations. From Siberia, these stories spread across Russia, to the German-occupied Ukraine, to Romania, and to elsewhere in Europe, a seemingly impregnable web of intrigue. There was talk of a rescued grand duchess, yet it could not be confirmed; a few people recalled the Bolsheviks openly searching for a missing imperial daughter, yet this occurred at a time when the Soviets were actively engaged in deceptive announcements; there were claims of posters warning of an escaped Anastasia, yet no one could ever produce one or even prove that they existed; and there were those who claimed knowledge of Anastasia’s presence or that of her alleged rescuer in Bucharest, yet such accounts emerged only after the claimant’s story was publicized and pleas for information printed in newspapers. There was no proof that Alexander Tchaikovsky ever existed; that he was in fact Stanislav Mishkevich; that he or anyone fitting his description had lived or died in Bucharest; nor that the claimant had wed her alleged rescuer and had his child baptized.
It all seemed so unlikely, but unlikely was not impossible. If no one could discover definitive evidence to support the claimant’s story, neither could her opponents find any conclusive proof that it had not happened. Unknown rescuers, tales of searches, stories from those both apparently credible and mysterious—in the end the claimant’s account came down to a simple question of belief in her integrity and in her asserted identity. Fraulein Annie’s tale of miraculous survival thus soon transcended the realm of objective fact, weaving its threads into the tapestry of myth enshrouding her claim.
8
A Ghost from the Past?
Despite the frequently implausible twists and turns it contained, the claimant’s rescue story did achieve one thing: she now gained a new name. In place of the ambiguous “Fraulein Unbekannt” and the even more peculiar “Fraulein Annie” adopted by the von Kleists came Frau Anastasia Tchaikovsky, derived from her presumed Christian name and the surname of her supposed rescuer and temporary husband. This is how the world first came to know the woman who became Anna Anderson, as her story took hold and spread in the pages of newspapers, magazines, and books as the 1920s progressed.
Just a week after her August 1922 disappearance from the von Kleist apartment, Frau Tchaikovsky found herself a guest of Berlin police inspector Franz Grunberg at his country estate at Funkenmühle outside the city. She arrived armed with her packets of photographs and growing collection of books on the Romanovs, her actual identity as much of a mystery as it had been on the night she had been pulled from the Landwehr Canal. To this point, she had confined her conversations to German, yet one of Grunberg’s relatives, Konrad Wahl, insisted that during this period she more often spoke in English than in German.1 This was the first mention of the claimant using English, yet it is not entirely convincing. Wahl, who had been a child at the time, apparently waited more than fifty years before volunteering this important bit of information, and may have harbored imprecise memories. It is certainly a problematic piece of evidence, for if such conversations actually took place, why did Inspector Grunberg not mention them in his own detailed report on her case?2 Surely, had Frau Tchaikovsky actually been conversant in English, someone—anyone—around her at this time would have noted the fact, especially given the immense controversy over her linguistic abilities. In fact, the idea was contradicted by Serge Botkin of the Office of Russian Refugees in Berlin, who flatly asserted, “She did not speak English during her stay in Berlin.”3
The omission of such a critical piece of evidence favorable to Frau Tchaikovsky’s claim, if it actually occurred, is all the more inexplicable given that Grunberg apparently believed she was the rescued grand duchess.
Anastasia is no adventuress, nor, in my opinion, is she merely the victim of a delusion that she is the Tsar’s daughter. After living with her for a number of months, I have become firmly convinced that she is a lady accustomed to intercourse with the highest circles of Russian society, and that it is likely she was born to a regal rank. Each of her words and movements reveals such a lofty dignity and commanding a bearing that it is impossible to claim she learned these characteristics later in her life.4
Grunberg held to this view even though he witnessed what, on the surface, seemed to be an apparently compelling rejection of Tchaikovsky’s claim. The inspector contacted Anastasia’s aunt Princess Irene, assuring her that the case was still unresolved and imploring her to come to Funkenmühle and judge the claimant herself. Just five months earlier, Irene had dispatched Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden to meet the young woman at Dalldorf in an encounter whose negative result seemed definitive. Yet Irene apparently remained uncertain, perhaps hoping that the former lady-in-waiting had been too rash. Now, at Hemmelmark, the estate near Kiel she shared with her husband, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, Irene agonized over the situation. The actual fate of the Romanovs was still unknown, the belief that they had all been killed merely a theory that was constantly challenged by a perpetual stream of rumor. Someone from the family had to resolve the issue. Victoria, marchioness of Milford Haven, eldest of Empress Alexandra’s surviving siblings, lived in England, while Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse was so distraught by events in Russia that putting him through the emotional ordeal of meeting the claimant was apparently never considered.5 And so it fell to Irene—sensible, good-natured Irene—to face the ghosts of the past in the young woman claiming to be her niece.
Princess Irene, who had seen Anastasia regularly on family holidays until 1913, arrived at Funkenmühle accompanied by Eleonore von Oertzen, her lady-in-waiting; Grunberg agreed to keep Irene’s identity a secret, and at dinner introduced her to the claimant under an assumed name. The princess, Grunberg recalled, “was placed opposite Anastasia, so as to be able to observe her carefully.” Her first impression was not favorable: “She did not think,” Grunberg recorded, “she could recognize her, but admitted to having seen the Imperial Family for the last time ten years
ago.”6 Irene herself declared:
I saw immediately that this could not be one of my nieces. Although I had not seen them for nine years, the fundamental traits of the face could not have changed to such a point, particularly the position of the eyes and ears. At first sight, one could perhaps find a certain resemblance to Grand Duchess Tatiana. I remained with the unknown woman, at the first with Fraulein von Oertzen, and then alone, but I could find no sign that she had recognized me. In 1912 and 1913 I had lived with my niece for many weeks, and myself had changed very little.7
Before Irene left Hemmelmark, her husband, Heinrich, had told her that if she was in any way uncertain, she should bring the claimant back with her so they could further investigate her story.8 At some point during the visit, as Fraulein von Oertzen later recalled, the princess may have followed her husband’s directive and extended such an invitation.9 But after a few uncomfortable minutes of silence, Frau Tchaikovsky suddenly jumped up and fled to her bedroom. Grunberg implored the princess to follow her; they found the claimant huddled in her bed, her back turned to her visitors in a display that even the sympathetic inspector termed a “disgusting” display of lèse-majesté.10