The Resurrection of the Romanovs

by Greg King

  “In vain,” Irene recorded, “I spoke to her using the intimate language of the past, reminding her of previous events, using nicknames, speaking of people we would both know, but none of it made any impression. Neither did she reply when I urged her to give any sign that she had recognized me.” Finally, “not wishing to neglect any possibility,” the princess said, “Don’t you know your Aunt Irene?” Anderson, however, refused to speak, and finally the princess left, armed, she said, with “the firm conviction that the unknown woman was not my niece. I no longer had the slightest doubt on the subject. We had formerly lived in such intimacy that the smallest sign or unconscious movement would have sufficiently awakened in me a convincing familial feeling.”11

  Attempting to explain away this adamant rejection, Frau Tchaikovsky later insisted that she had been insulted to have her “aunt” presented to her under a false name.12 “I was ill,” she declared, “had to get up, the room was dark, and then a lady came. I knew the voice, and was listening to the voice, but did not know because the name was different. Then, at table, the face was familiar to me, but I did not know, was not sure. Then I recognized Aunt Irene.”13 Yet not even the favorably inclined Grunberg suggested that the claimant had recognized her visitor.

  Irene, Grunberg recalled, was “profoundly revolted” at the encounter and “wanted nothing further to do with the whole matter.”14 But Frau Tchaikovsky was not content to let the matter rest. “Dear Aunt,” she wrote to the princess, “you will probably remember how you came to Funkenmühle. . . . I have certainly recognized you at the time, but was so upset that you made out before me to be somebody else that in the first moment I was terribly hurt. . . . Please be so kind as to call on me again as soon as possible so that I can tell you all and that you can see I am really Anastasia.”15 A few weeks later: “Dear Aunt Irene, Must implore your forgiveness that then at Funkenmühle I did not speak. It was all so unexpected and you were introduced to me as a strange lady so I had lost all courage, I entreat you to bring me somewhere, else they have the intention to put me into an asylum or hospital, love and kisses, your Anastasia.”16

  These communications produced no response, and finally Frau Tchaikovsky appealed to Clara Peuthert to intercede. The message Peuthert dispatched was unlikely to win over anyone at Hemmelmark, for she began her long, ungrammatical letter by saying that she had not wanted to write on “Anastasia’s behalf” because “I consider myself too good to be thought of by everyone as stupid or a liar or worse crazy.” All the claimant wanted, Peuthert declared, was for her “Aunt Irene” to provide “some little corner” in which she could live out her last days, before she “passed from this world.”17 This was too much, they thought at Hemmelmark, for within two weeks Prince Heinrich’s secretary wrote to Baroness von Kleist, who had herself tried to intercede with Irene on the claimant’s behalf: “His Royal Highness requests me to inform you that he, as well as his wife—after the visit of the latter to your protégé—have reached the unshakable conviction that she is not one of the Tsar’s daughters, especially not Grand Duchess Anastasia. Prince Heinrich considers the matter, as related to himself and to the Princess, as clarified and settled, and insists that you refrain from further communications or requests of him or of the Princess.”18

  This was the end of Irene’s involvement, at least publicly, though privately she is said to have wavered. Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, whose sister married Irene’s son Prince Sigismund, once confronted the princess over her rejection. Irene listened patiently to his argument in favor of the claimant before finally insisting, “I couldn’t have made a mistake, I couldn’t have made a mistake!”19 According to Prince Friedrich, the princess finally admitted, “She is similar, she is similar, but what does it mean if it is not she?”20 A few years after Irene’s death, Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, in a letter to his cousin Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, declared that the princess had admitted—to whom he did not say—that “she might have made a mistake, and that it probably is Anastasia.”21 This is possible, especially if Irene later tried to reconcile a single traumatic encounter and rejection against the apparently compelling evidence that favored Tchaikovsky’s claim. Such apparent struggles to accept decisions made under intensely emotional circumstances plagued those on both sides of the case, reflecting the air of uncertainty that lingered over the claim.

  Those Russian émigrés who disputed the claimant presumed that the apparently negative encounter with Princess Irene, coming just a few months after the denunciation by Baroness Buxhoeveden, would end the matter, but they were wrong. People whispered of doubt: for every rejection and piece of contrary evidence there seemed to be someone who believed that Tchaikovsky was Anastasia, and some intriguing and inexplicable fact that weighed in her favor. It was this irresolvable conflict that fed the mystery, for no one could satisfactorily explain away the opinions of Irene and Buxhoeveden nor the accumulating evidence supporting the claimant’s case. It all remained a tantalizing enigma.

  Despite the tensions that existed, the von Kleists remained convinced, at least in these years, that their occasional guest was Anastasia. That autumn of 1922, they arranged for the claimant to meet two former courtiers, Captain Nicholas Sablin and Admiral Federov, both of whom had served aboard the imperial yacht Standart. These men had known Anastasia well; in 1912, the thirty-two-year-old Sablin also had been appointed an adjutant to Nicholas II, and saw the imperial family not only on their annual cruises but also throughout the year while on duty at Tsarskoye Selo and on their holidays in the Crimea, when he often accompanied the grand duchesses on walks and partnered them in games of tennis.22 At the meeting, over dinner in a Berlin restaurant, Sablin and Federov openly reminisced, in Russian, about the imperial family, annual cruises in Finland, holidays in the Crimea, and about the Romanovs and their courtiers, ostensibly to see if the conversation sparked any reaction from the claimant. “After some time,” Sablin recalled, he asked “which of the young women present” claimed to be Anastasia; when she was pointed out, Sablin said he “found no resemblance” to the grand duchess. “We talked with the Admiral about walks, trips, parties, and many events well known to the Grand Duchesses and, although we did so loudly, the person in question showed no sign of interest.” At the end of the evening, Sablin again declared that the claimant was not Anastasia, insisting that “not a single feature of her face reminded me of the Grand Duchesses, nor of any of the Imperial Family.”23

  Sablin had known Anastasia as well as anyone outside of her family, and his rejection was problematic for those who believed the claimant was the grand duchess. There would later be insinuations against Sablin—and others who, like him, rejected Frau Tchaikovsky—that he may have done so from ulterior motives. With Sablin, it was a case of his behavior in 1917, when following the Revolution he—like many courtiers—had deserted the Romanovs. “It was a fact Sablin never lived down,” wrote Peter Kurth, “and something a daughter of Nicholas II might not have forgotten.”24 Was this meant to suggest that Sablin refused to recognize the claimant as Anastasia because he feared she would then turn around and condemn him for his previous actions? If that was the theory, it made little sense for Sablin to have agreed to a meeting in the first place, but whispers and hints of intrigue would pepper the case, carefully, cautiously insinuating duplicitous motives to those who failed to acknowledge Frau Tchaikovsky as Anastasia.

  And what of Federov? According to Sablin, the admiral shared his opinion: the claimant was not Anastasia.25 Yet Baroness von Kleist recorded that Federov told her that “had she spoken Russian to him, or had she spoken with him of any shared memories, or had she awoken any memories in himself, then he would have been prepared to recognize her as Anastasia.”26 Was Federov uncertain, but leaning toward acknowledging her as the grand duchess, as her supporters believed? Or was he merely offering a list of the reasons why he had been unable to recognize her as Anastasia?

  Frau Tchaikovsky was a restless, lonely figure in these years, value
d only for what the ambitious could envision winning from her claim and shuffled from one émigré to another like an unwelcome burden. Her health was deteriorating and forced her into extended stays at various Berlin hospitals. That she was truly ill no one could doubt: even by the spring of 1922, when she left Dalldorf, she was already suffering from the early effects of tuberculosis; serious infections came and went, along with bouts of anemia and persistent headaches. In the autumn of 1922 she was admitted to Berlin’s West End Hospital, a Catholic-run institution at Charlottenburg, under the name of Anastasia Tchaikovsky and treated for the tubercular infection on her chest.27 She came and went from the hospital over the next year as her health improved or worsened; by the summer of 1925 she was again a patient, this time at Berlin’s St. Mary’s Hospital.28

  Anna Anderson in St. Mary’s Hospital, Berlin, 1925.

  Fortunately, finally, a disparate trio had stepped in and begun to tend to Frau Tchaikovsky’s interests in an organized fashion. Serge Botkin, president of the Office of Russian Refugees in Berlin, was a cousin of Dr. Eugene Botkin, who had been murdered in Ekaterinburg with the Romanovs. Assisted by his deputy Baron Vassili Osten-Sacken, Botkin collected and distributed funds among the émigré community, organizing their feeble efforts at cohesion and offering a single channel through which the human flotsam of the Russian Empire could appeal for official papers and needed aid.29 Witnesses and depositions, claims and counterclaims all flowed through Botkin’s office in these years, making him one of the best-informed people in Berlin on the case. He was seemingly impartial in his conduct, and never publicly offered an opinion on her identity; privately, however, he was favorably disposed to her claim.30

  Anna Anderson in a Berlin hospital, tended by Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann, 1925.

  Herluf Zahle, the Danish minister to Berlin, was the second member of this triumvirate. A future temporary president of the League of Nations, Zahle began his involvement with the case innocently enough, exposed to the increasing rumors in the German capital; in time, however, he assumed a much larger role in the saga.31 Those involved with the claimant eventually came to view Zahle strictly in terms of black or white. For those who supported Tchaikovsky’s claim, he was a noble and honest diplomat, attempting to navigate a fine line between impartiality and his own eventual belief that she was Anastasia; those who opposed her claim, however, charged him with naive partiality, pointing out that he did all in his power to advance her case.32

  The last of the trio arrived on the scene in June 1925. This was a middle-aged woman named Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann, who soon became Frau Tchaikovsky’s principal caretaker, most ardent supporter, dedicated chronicler, and the person who, more than any other, propelled her case into legend. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Riga—then a Russian province—Rathlef-Keilmann converted to Catholicism, married, had four children, and escaped to Germany after the Revolution, where—following her 1922 divorce—she established herself as an illustrator and sculptor of some repute. She was brought into the case by Dr. Karl Sonnenschein of St. Mary’s Hospital, who at the time was treating the claimant for a recurrence of tuberculosis.33 Opinions of Rathlef-Keilmann varied greatly, though no one doubted that she was absolutely dedicated to the claimant. Those who believed Tchaikovsky was Anastasia were convinced that Rathlef-Keilmann was absolutely honest, while opponents accused her, generously, of naïveté, and more often asserted that she deliberately distorted and suppressed information that undermined the claimant’s case. The latter, at least, was the opinion of former imperial tutor Pierre Gilliard, who at first believed Rathlef-Keilmann to be “an exalted person whose imprudent zeal threatened” her integrity.34 Even some of those who supported the claimant were at times troubled by what Zahle termed Rathlef-Keilmann’s “fixed ideas” and her “partiality” in investigating the supposed grand duchess and ignoring contrary evidence.35

  By 1925, and after more than three years of intrigue over her claim, Frau Tchaikovsky remained very much an enigma. No one could quite agree, not only on her identity but also on her personality. Having observed her in the privacy of their Berlin apartment, both Nicholas von Schwabe and his wife, Alice, were less than impressed with the alleged grand duchess in whom they had first believed. Alice, in particular, was “persuaded that Frau Tchaikovsky was neither Russian, nor Orthodox.”36 Yet Dr. Ludwig Berg, who met her at St. Mary’s Hospital in Berlin, recorded that “in every circumstance she showed proof of altogether distinguished manners, and her conversation and her attitude were those of a person of good education.”37 These conflicting impressions underscored the claimant’s complex personality, her frequent changes of mood, her ability to appear completely charming one minute and storm into uncontrolled rages the next. Rathlef-Keilmann offered a knowing and not altogether flattering description of her character. Frau Tchaikovsky, she recorded, was “unable to understand actions that were genuinely intended for her welfare. Often she suspected those who were unselfishly working on her behalf.”38 The claimant “knew well how to sulk. She is sulky. In such periods of ill humor she even upbraided me, and asserted that I grudged her everything. With all her charm it is sometimes very difficult to get on with her, as she is irritable and oversensitive; for days at a time, she sulks and says nothing. She sulks and mopes, and displays with the utmost arrogance the consciousness of her social superiority. . . . Despite her sensitiveness, her mistrust, and her willfulness, she is a person of great charm, with whom it is impossible to be angry for long, and whom everyone who learns to know must love.”39 This says something of the claimant’s innate charm, that even those who suffered her fits of temper regarded her with loyalty.

  Frau Tchaikovsky remained isolated in these years, confined to a succession of Berlin apartments and hospital wards, but her notoriety spread through Berlin and elsewhere in Germany and Europe. Even among members of Europe’s royal families it had become a subject of considerable allure and intrigue. Crowned uncles, aunts, and cousins took opposing views of this seemingly enigmatic case. Shortly after arriving on the scene, Rathlef-Heilmann dispatched a woman named Amy Smith to Darmstadt to plead the case with Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse. Smith carried a dossier of reports, affidavits, and photographs supporting the idea that Tchaikovsky was the grand duke’s niece. The grand duke, though, was less than impressed: his sister Irene had met with and rejected the claimant, and he had no reason to doubt her. Count Kuno von Hardenberg, the grand duke’s former marshal of the court, told Smith that “it was impossible that Anastasia or any member of the Imperial Family” could have survived the executions in Ekaterinburg.40 Privately, the grand duke suspected that the case was driven by Soviet agents “hoping to lay their hands” on any tsarist money in Europe.41

  Yet others were more amenable to the idea that the claimant might just be Anastasia after all. Princess Martha of Sweden, who later married the future King Olav of Norway, came to Berlin in the 1920s and asked to meet Frau Tchaikovsky. When told how notoriously difficult the claimant could be over such encounters, she settled on viewing her from a distance. “That’s Anastasia!” the princess is said to have exclaimed, according to a later secondhand story, though how she could reach such a decision, especially given that she had last met Anastasia when the latter was still a child, is not known.42 One royal reaction without question came from former crown princess Cecilie, married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s eldest son and herself the daughter of a Russian grand duchess. She, too, visited Frau Tchaikovsky in Berlin; though she had only a passing familiarity with Anastasia, she thought that the claimant bore some resemblance to members of the imperial family, particularly to Nicholas II and to his mother, Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. Her efforts at conversation failed. “She remained completely silent,” Cecilie recalled, “either from stubbornness or from confusion—which I could not decide.” The princess eventually left without forming a definite opinion.43 Nevertheless, she was interested enough to raise the issue with her sister-in-law Viktoria Luise, the kaiser’s only daughte
r; when Viktoria Luise, in turn, discussed the case with her mother-in-law, Thyra, duchess of Cumberland, things took a dramatic turn, for Thyra was a sister to Nicholas II’s mother.44

  Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, in her last years in her native Copenhagen.

  Recent events had not been kind to Marie Feodorovna. Long alienated from her daughter-in-law Empress Alexandra, the dowager empress had lost all three of her sons: George from tuberculosis in 1899, and Nicholas II and his brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, both victims of Bolshevik firing squads in 1918, while the presumed massacre in Ekaterinburg had taken the lives of five of her grandchildren. She had escaped Russia in 1919 with her daughter Xenia Alexandrovna (her other daughter, Olga Alexandrovna, fled the country separately), eventually settling in her native Denmark; here she lived outside Copenhagen in a villa called Hvidøre with Olga; Olga’s second, morganatic husband, Nicholas Kulikovsky; and their two sons. At the time, Nicholas II’s first cousin King Christian X sat upon the Danish throne; though his aunt Marie Feodorovna held fast to the idea that none of the imperial family had been killed, he listened to the stories of the claimant told by Thyra and by the dowager empress’s brother Prince Waldemar of Denmark, who was intrigued with the case. Apparently with the king’s blessing, Waldemar asked Herluf Zahle in Berlin to begin a private investigation into her case.45 Waldemar also asked Zahle to discreetly step in and pay the young woman’s expenses until the issue of her identity could firmly be settled.46

  The Hessian royal family, relatives of Empress Alexandra, had taken an early interest in the case and at least made efforts to satisfy themselves about her asserted identity, but not a single Romanov had yet expressed any curiosity in the mysterious young woman. This finally changed when Zahle reported back to Copenhagen that the claimant might be Anastasia. Prince Waldemar apparently spoke with Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, and the latter agreed to send former courtier Alexei Volkov to Berlin to meet the young woman and report his findings.47 If she was a fraud, the issue was to be considered as settled; if, however, he was uncertain, the matter would be further investigated.48