by Greg King
Before the meeting, the duke pulled Mordvinov aside and warned him that injuries and the passage of time might well have altered the claimant’s features “so greatly that she is unrecognizable” as Anastasia. This certainly lowered expectations, but Mordvinov had not changed, and “placed great importance on being recognized by the patient.” He spent three days with Frau Tchaikovsky; at his request, she was not told of his identity. Apparently, when confronted with her visitor, she was perplexed, and attempted to wrest clues from those around her. “Who is he?” she asked after the first meeting. “A Russian or a German? What is his family name?” No one would tell her, though eventually she did learn that the man was Russian. Mordvinov attempted to question Frau Tchaikovsky using both Russian and German; she provided few if any answers, at first appearing agitated, then alternately smiling and covering her mouth with a handkerchief. He was puzzled at what he deemed her “complete lack of similarity” to Anastasia. The only resemblance, he said, was that the claimant shared Anastasia’s blue eyes.11
At their last meeting, when finally told the name of her visitor, Frau Tchaikovsky showed no recognition. Mordvinov thought that she lacked “the innate simplicity that was characteristic of the real Grand Duchess. The enigmatic patient seemed to be so imbued—almost excessively so—with notions of her own noble origins that I think she had grown into the idea. Her manner of speech, of talking about the past, her sorrows and joys, her point of view—all was that of a person entirely different to the Grand Duchess.”12 During this final encounter, Mordvinov purposely toyed with a cigarette holder that the four grand duchesses had presented to him shortly before the Revolution; they had something of a running joke with the frequently careless adjutant, asking each time they saw him if he had lost their gift. But Frau Tchaikovsky seemed uninterested, and Mordvinov left Seeon convinced that the claimant was “a complete stranger to me, physically and morally.”13
Anastasia with Colonel Anatole Mordvinov, her father’s adjutant, in the park at Tsarskoye Selo, about 1913.
Frau Tchaikovsky later insisted, as she had done before, that she had recognized her visitor but had been unable to recall his name, yet this seems unlikely.14 Faced with such an apparently categorical rejection, some of her supporters insinuated that the former adjutant had denied her only to protect himself and salvage his reputation, for after the Revolution he—like many former courtiers—had deserted the imprisoned Romanovs. But Mordvinov’s actions were well known before he met the claimant, and he was on friendly terms with Nicholas II’s sister Olga Alexandrovna, who did not hold his behavior in 1917 against him. As such, the arguments rang hollow.
But not every meeting was negative. It was at Seeon that Frau Tchaikovsky won from former Russian soldier Felix Dassel what was, according to the mythology surrounding her case, one of her most compelling recognitions as Anastasia. In autumn 1916, Dassel—a captain in Grand Duchess Marie Nikolaievna’s 9th Infantry Regiment of the Kazan Dragoons—was shot in the leg and evacuated to Tsarskoye Selo, where he recuperated at the hospital founded by Anastasia and her sister; here he remained from September until late February (according to the Julian calendar) 1917, seeing Anastasia a few times a week when she visited the patients. After the Revolution, Dassel made his way to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist for several émigré publications. Although he admitted to learning of the claimant in 1923, Dassel said he had no interest in Frau Tchaikovsky’s case until 1927, when it received intense coverage in the press.15
In September 1927, Dassel traveled to Seeon to meet Frau Tchaikovsky. What happened during this visit soon slipped into legend. Before the meeting, Dassel—who as a special adjutant to the grand duchesses had come to know them well—wrote an account of his time in the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo containing “details that only the real Anastasia” would know. He “sealed the notes in an envelope” and handed them to the duke of Leuchtenberg, who put the sealed envelope in a safe to preclude the possibility that the claimant could see them. “He then met and questioned the claimant, making deliberate mistakes to discover whether or not she would correct them. The claimant passed the test with flying colors.” This included correcting “Dassel’s deliberate error of placing the billiard table” at the hospital on the wrong floor and accurately refuting Dassel’s assertion that the grand duchesses had come to the hospital every day and had often brought their brother, Alexei, with them. “The clincher for Dassel came when the Duke of Leuchtenberg referred to an old Russian colonel” in a photograph, and the claimant erupted into sudden laughter, exclaiming, “The Man with the Pockets!” This, Dassel said, had been a nickname bestowed upon the officer by Anastasia herself, owing to the colonel’s habit of always speaking to the grand duchesses with his hands thrust into his pockets, in defiance of imperial etiquette. “Abruptly I recognized her,” Dassel said. “I was convinced.”16
This sounds compelling, for who but Anastasia would know such obscure information or identify by nickname an otherwise unknown colonel? Such things surely couldn’t be put down to coincidence or lucky guesses, and Dassel’s recognition has stood as one of the most convincing pieces of evidence that Frau Tchaikovsky was indeed the youngest daughter of Nicholas II. Unfortunately for history, though, much of what has been said about this encounter is at best contradictory and at worst simply untrue.
Dassel initially wrote to the duke of Leuchtenberg about the claimant, saying he had known Anastasia and suggesting that he ask Frau Tchaikovsky if she could identify “Mandrifolie.” “The Duke,” Dassel later said, “told me that the patient had looked at him for a long while as if in shock, and then remarked that her sister Marie had many nicknames.”17 Dassel deemed this correct, although he seems to be the only source to suggest that Marie Nikolaievna ever bore such a nickname, for it is mentioned nowhere else. But this was enough, Dassel said, to convince him to travel to Seeon.
The former captain arrived on the evening of September 14, 1927, accompanied by a friend named Otto Bornemann, but there were immediate problems, for Frau Tchaikovsky—having been warned of a visitor from her past—refused to receive him. Maria Baumgarten, Vera von Klemenz, and the duke had been working hard to change her mind, but told Dassel that if he was presented, he needed “to be patient, and not press her too quickly with questions.”18 Baumgarten finally won her over, but spent the rest of the evening, as both the duke and Dassel later admitted, helping Frau Tchaikovsky “prepare” for the meeting. And this wasn’t simply a matter of bolstering her courage; almost incredibly, Baumgarten sat with the claimant, poring over a souvenir photograph album of Anastasia’s hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. If, before this, Frau Tchaikovsky had no idea who her visitor was or what his connection to Anastasia had been, she certainly knew he had been involved with the hospital by the time she retired for the evening.19 But no one knew of this crash course, for Dassel omitted it from his later accounts.
The next morning Baumgarten overtly confirmed to Frau Tchaikovsky that her visitor was a former Russian officer and patient in the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. Then, suddenly, she reversed her earlier decision to meet him. “She only kept repeating that she wished to be spared of the past, that she could no longer stand such reminiscences,” Baumgarten said. Hoping to convince her, Dassel gave Baumgarten two photographs, asking that she show them to the claimant: one showed Dassel, in his dressing gown, sitting on his hospital bed between Marie and Anastasia; the other showed the grand duchesses and a group of officers standing at the hospital entrance, which Dassel purposely misidentified as a church. He wanted to know if the claimant recognized the church. When shown the image, Frau Tchaikovsky corrected the error, though this was not surprising, given that her commemorative album bore the same photograph along with numerous other depictions of the hospital exterior.20
Not until September 16 did Frau Tchaikovsky finally agree to receive Dassel for ten minutes. Escorted by the duke and accompanied by Bornemann, Baumgarten, and Vera von Klemenz, Dassel was taken to the claimant’s sitting room on
the castle’s second floor. They found her reclining on a sofa, peering nervously from behind a blanket that she had pulled up to cover most of her face.21
“I’ve brought you a former Dragoon,” the duke announced. “Don’t worry, we won’t stay very long.” Frau Tchaikovsky said nothing; she dropped the blanket, only to conceal her mouth behind a handkerchief as Dassel approached. “On a sudden impulse,” Dassel recalled, he clicked his heels together, saluted, and said in Russian, “Your Imperial Highness! Captain Dassel of the Dragoon Regiment of Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Marie Nikolaievna!” Frau Tchaikovsky remained on the sofa but extended her hand; when Dassel leaned forward to kiss it, he tried to examine what he could see of her face.22 Frau Tchaikovsky had agreed to the meeting only on the condition that she not be asked about the past, which made any questions pointless; instead, the conversation turned on her health, the weather, and other trivialities. Dassel spoke in Russian, while the claimant replied only in German. Dassel was not impressed; “the face said nothing to me,” he wrote, and in general he thought it was “too difficult” to detect any resemblance to Anastasia.23 That evening, Frau Tchaikovsky had Baumgarten ask Dassel if he had received the medal given by the grand duchesses to all of their former patients when discharged from hospital; the previous year she had seen one of the medals at Stillachhaus.24 But the Revolution, Dassel said, had erupted before his discharge.25
The next morning, Dassel watched the claimant pass down a corridor; for the first time he detected some resemblance to Anastasia, not in her features but in the way she walked.26 He was still not convinced. “It was impossible for me to be at peace without having definitively resolved this enigma,” he recorded. Contrary to his later versions, it was at this point—and not before arriving at Seeon—that Dassel, “after discussing the plan with the Duke,” wrote down his memories of the hospital and handed the envelope to Leuchtenberg.27 The duke and Baumgarten, privy to the questions, now began to confront her with Dassel’s memories. Baumgarten first asked if she recalled Nicholas II’s tattoo.28 This, the claimant insisted, was nonsense. She had, she declared, often seen her father rowing, with his shirtsleeves rolled up, and “Papa had nothing on either arm. No, no, that I can say for sure. He had nothing whatever.”29 But she was wrong. In 1891, during a visit to Japan while still tsesarevich, Nicholas had a dragon tattooed on his right arm, a design so large and colorful that it had, as he recorded in his diary, taken seven hours to complete.30 Why, if Frau Tchaikovsky was Anastasia, would she make such an obvious mistake?
Another test came when Dassel mentioned his regret that he had not received “the watches and sabers presented to the other officers” in the military hospital. This was a “deliberately false statement,” Dassel later wrote, and the claimant corrected his error.31 Yet what actually happened was quite different. According to Vera von Klemenz, when the claimant was told of this she apparently said nothing. Later, though, Frau Tchaikovsky remarked, “I know we gave presents, but I do not recall any longer what they were. It is so long ago. I cannot picture it. Watches, yes, but I do not think sabers. I don’t know. Sabers? Sabers? Perhaps this was done in my mother’s hospital. But if he says it, then it must be so.”32 Not only was there no correction here, but also Frau Tchaikovsky ended by agreeing that Dassel’s “deliberately false” statement was true.
More questions and “deliberately false” statements came on the last day of the visit. Dassel declared that the grand duchesses had visited the hospital every day. “No, not every day,” the claimant rightly corrected him.33 Then there was his question of the hospital billiards table: according to Dassel, he erroneously insisted that it had been in an upstairs room. The claimant objected, saying, “No! Billiard table was downstairs!”34 But Faith Lavington, who also was present, recalled the question differently. Dassel, she wrote in her diary that night, insisted that he had “quite frankly forgotten” where the billiards table was located, suggesting that he “had an idea” that it had been on the second floor but making no definitive statement.35 Aside from this, though, and to further questions and erroneous statements, Frau Tchaikovsky, as Dassel recounted, “made us understand that she does not remember anything.”36
On the last afternoon Dassel closely studied the claimant’s face, attempting to compare what he saw with his memory of Anastasia. As he looked, he perceived “the same eyes” as the real grand duchess, “the Emperor’s eyes.” Finally he said, “I knew. I recognized Grand Duchess Anastasia.”37 With this, Dassel left Seeon. “Based on a great deal of detailed observation,” read his statement the next day, “I was able to come to the conviction that the patient is Grand Duchess Anastasia, despite the fact that she has changed a great deal externally and is suffering a great lack of memory.”38
The eyes, the same eyes, “the Emperor’s eyes”—for Dassel, this was apparently what convinced him, for he admitted that the claimant’s general appearance was different. But how well had Dassel really known Anastasia? From a few weekly visits to patients spread out over six months? Even the apparently intimate knowledge Dassel found so convincing wasn’t quite as convincing as the mythology suggests. Frau Tchaikovsky’s recognition of the nickname “Mandrifolie” would have been more convincing if there was any reference to its use independent of Dassel. She knew about the commemorative hospital medallions, but then, she had discussed them with a friend a year earlier. She had studied photographs of the hospital and its patients before facing Dassel or his questions; she had not actually corrected his deliberate error regarding gifts of sabers; and she had erroneously insisted that Nicholas II had no tattoo. Maybe it was all compelling, or seemed so, but it is also clear that elements of the legend relied on variations, omissions, and incorrect information.
And the same is true of what has always been taken to be the single most intriguing aspect of Dassel’s recognition, the famous “Man with the Pockets” story. This took place a few weeks after Dassel’s first visit. While showing Frau Tchaikovsky photographs of the hospital patients and staff, the duke of Leuchtenberg pointed to one man and apparently asked if she recalled his name. She did not, but said, “Great big officer, I remember—always used to put his hands in pockets, always forgot it, was not nice.” This, Dassel said, was indeed correct: contrary to etiquette, the man in question, a Colonel Sergeyev, had often addressed the grand duchesses with his hands thrust into his pockets.39 But where, in this, did the claimant burst out with a laugh and exclaim, “The Man with the Pockets!” as the legend insisted? Dassel made no such claim in his book, and Frau Tchaikovsky apparently did little more than remark on the officer’s bad habit. Still, how would she know such an insignificant detail? Perhaps the photograph actually showed the man with his hands thrust into his pockets and she merely commented on what she saw, but for those who believed that she was Anastasia it was a convincing piece of evidence in her favor.40
Those opposed to Frau Tchaikovsky’s claim, though, pointed out that Dassel was working as a journalist and soon produced an account of his meeting, as if this mere fact was sufficient to cast aspersions on his honesty. Dassel admitted to learning of Frau Tchaikovsky’s case while living in Berlin in 1923, but insisted—rather curiously, for someone who carried such vivid and apparently treasured memories of his encounters with Anastasia at Tsarskoye Selo—that the question of her identity had not been of any interest. And with this, at least, Dassel’s credibility crumbled, for he had been a frequent visitor to the von Kleist apartment during the claimant’s stay. He later spoke of Baron von Kleist as “someone who inspired in me little confidence” and noted that the circle of émigrés around him “seemed to harbor hopes that they could benefit from the claimant in some financial way,” suggesting that he possessed more than a passing familiarity with the baron.41 Gerda von Kleist recalled seeing Dassel numerous times at her parents’ apartment.42 Frau Tchaikovsky’s supporters rejected this idea, saying that Gerda was unreliable and had refused to swear to this fact, but it was confirmed by a surprising source: Baro
ness von Kleist, who fully believed that the claimant was Anastasia and thus had little reason to undermine her case. She recalled, “Herr Dassel came to us more and more in this time, and through us he learned who ‘Fraulein Unbekannt’ was supposed to be. He let it be known that he had seen Anastasia in her hospital, and thus knew her well from Russia.”43
The implication was ugly: that Dassel had met and discussed his memories with Frau Tchaikovsky and that the encounter at Seeon had been a charade, enacted for a gullible audience to provide a convincing mise-en-scène for his recognition of the claimant as Anastasia. Had this been true, though, would he really have waited four years to arrange a definite meeting with Tchaikovsky? Yet if such a proposition seems unlikely, troubling questions remain. Dassel certainly seems to have visited the von Kleist apartment and expressed enough interest in the claimant to speak of his time in the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo; why, then, did he later insist that her identity had been of no interest to him at the time? It is possible that Frau Tchaikovsky learned certain details innocently enough, passed along to the von Kleists during these visits. Neglected in such arguments, though, is one startling fact: in April 1927, Dassel had published an extensive article in a German magazine on his experiences in the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo, discussing memories of his stay, his fellow patients, and his interaction with the grand duchesses—an article that may certainly have come to Frau Tchaikovsky’s attention in the months before she met the former patient that fall at Seeon.44 No matter the connections, what the legend often portrayed as the claimant’s uncannily intimate knowledge as confirmed by Dassel turns out to be somewhat less than compelling and even occasionally wrong.