by Greg King
“Fourteen years had passed since the spring of 1914, when I had last seen Anastasia in the Crimea,” Xenia later said, but she believed herself “competent to distinguish between a member of my own family” and an impostor. Over the next five months, Xenia Georgievna gradually formed an opinion on her guest’s identity, a quest made somewhat difficult by what she termed the claimant’s “frequent agitation, volatile emotions, and changes of mood.” In time, however, she became convinced that Frau Tchaikovsky was Anastasia. “I should not say,” Xenia Georgievna declared, “that even after prolonged exposure, I recognized the claimant visually. My recognition was based on an intuitive impression of a family resemblance, especially to her mother’s relatives. One of the most convincing aspects of her personality was a completely unconscious acceptance of her identity. At all times she was herself, and never gave the impression of acting a role.” According to Xenia, the claimant “never, no matter the pressure, ever made an error that would have shaken my growing conviction and final complete embrace in her identity.”13
At Frau Tchaikovsky’s request, Xenia Georgievna largely avoided questioning her about her alleged past or recalling incidents in Russia; and yet, rather than discuss innocuous subjects such as courtiers or servants, holidays in the Crimea, or rooms in the imperial palaces, the claimant “many times,” Xenia recalled, raised her supposed survival of the massacre of her family and escape across Siberia, and her alleged time in Bucharest.14 Perhaps she simply wished to avoid her alleged childhood owing to difficulty in remembering, or to escape the inevitable feeling that she was being scrutinized, but Frau Tchaikovsky’s apparent willingness to relive what would have been the most brutal period in Anastasia’s life was altogether odd.
Yet if this seemed strange, there also were those inexplicable turns, things that suggested—as they had so often in this case—that Frau Tchaikovsky might very well be Anastasia. Xenia had agreed to the claimant’s request not to arrange any confrontations or meetings with relatives, but one day her cousin Prince Dimitri Alexandrovich came to Kenwood to play tennis with a friend. A mesh fence overgrown with vines separated the tennis court from the claimant’s window, so that she could hear the game but not see it being played. As Xenia recalled, Dimitri and his friend were playing, calling out the score and yelling back and forth to each other in English. When Xenia entered the claimant’s room later that day, Frau Tchaikovsky was furious. “You lied to me!” she screamed. “You promised not to bring them here!” When Xenia pressed, the claimant cried, “I know his voice! It’s one of the cousins!”15
Who but Anastasia, Xenia Georgievna was convinced, could identify some minor Romanov cousin merely by hearing his voice? No one seems to have actually questioned the implicit implication: that a surviving Anastasia possessed such extraordinary recall that she could accurately recognize the voice of a cousin whom she had not seen for more than a decade. Yet a more mundane answer suggested itself to Frau Tchaikovsky’s opponents. Although she couldn’t see the players, the claimant had heard and followed their conversation as they shouted back and forth; it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that names were used that provided Frau Tchaikovsky with the identity of at least one of the men.
And, as usual, there were renewed controversies over languages. Stories asserted that during her stay at Kenwood, Frau Tchaikovsky had occasionally and unintentionally lapsed into Russian. A visiting Margharita Derfelden later recalled that once, when walking through the garden, the claimant had “talked of the flowers in Russian, calling them by their quaint Russian names.”16 More famously, Xenia Georgievna once supposedly walked into the claimant’s room while the latter was playing at the window with her two pet parakeets. “Look!” Frau Tchaikovsky said in Russian. “They are dancing on the windowsill!” From this, Xenia declared that the claimant spoke “perfectly acceptable Russian from the point of view of St. Petersburg society.”17
Convincing? As relayed in numerous accounts favorable to Frau Tchaikovsky’s claim, yes; in truth, no. Derfelden did indeed declare that the claimant had spoken of flowers at Kenwood using Russian names; but she—and not Xenia Georgievna—also was the source for the parakeet story. In the early 1970s, Xenia Georgievna’s nephew Prince David Chavchavadze told case historian Brien Horan that he had often heard the parakeet story from his mother, Princess Nina Georgievna, who said that she, in turn, had heard it from Xenia herself. The remark about the quality of the claimant’s spoken Russian also originated with Chavchavadze; the words frequently quoted were thus not those of Xenia Georgievna but, at best, a thirdhand version of what she may have said.18
Yet even this is problematic. In 1959, Xenia spent two days answering questions about the claimant at the West German consulate in New York. When asked specifically about Frau Tchaikovsky’s languages, she declared, “From the beginning the claimant and myself communicated only in English. Her English accent was good, but she was somewhat out of practice, in that sometimes she could not find the correct expression. However, we never spoke Russian together, despite the fact that one day I said to her, ‘It’s a pity that we don’t speak Russian, our mother tongue.’ The claimant explained on this and other occasions that she did not want to hear Russian.”19
So Xenia never heard the claimant speak Russian during her stay at Kenwood. Was the parakeet story merely a bit of lore, filtered through the family, until it assumed a veneer of truth? Perhaps it all originated with Derfelden, who told it to Xenia, who told it to Nina, who told it to her son David Chavchavadze; what is clear, though, is that the reality behind the myth wasn’t as compelling as everyone was led to believe. Xenia said that she spoke to Frau Tchaikovsky in English throughout her stay, although as she admitted, while her accent was “excellent,” she occasionally had to search for the right words or expressions. Yet Xenia’s sister Princess Nina Chavchavadze met the claimant and came away with quite a different impression. Frau Tchaikovsky, she was convinced, was not Anastasia, though she believed her to be “a lady of good society.”20 The claimant’s linguistic skills, though, stunned her: “My God, what English she spoke! I didn’t even have to be told that she was an impostor by the way she spoke English. . . . We all spoke Russian in the family. But I’ve heard her [Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna] speak English. She used to speak English with her mother, and it wasn’t that sort of English, I assure you.”21
In the end, Xenia Georgievna, as she fervently declared in 1959, was “convinced that the claimant is in fact Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.”22 She never wavered from this view, but the decision caused her nothing but grief. Visiting America at the time, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, brother-in-law and second cousin to Nicholas II, and Xenia Georgievna’s uncle, was repeatedly hounded by a persistent gaggle of reporters who were interested only in the enigmatic young woman’s identity. With his typical flair for the mystic, the grand duke asserted that Anastasia’s “spirit has returned to this world, and incorporated itself into another body. She knows so much about the intimate life of the Tsar and his family that there is simply no other explanation for it; and of course it wouldn’t be the first time that a spirit has returned to earth in new physical form.”23 But the Romanovs took aim not at Alexander Mikhailovich but at Xenia. “Xenia’s irresponsible statement should be somehow refuted,” one relative declared. “We know she left Russia in 1914, aged ten-years-old; I also know that Nina and Xenia never saw Uncle Nicky’s family very often, and when they did see them that was when they were very young.”24
The claimant’s stay with Xenia Georgievna spread over five highly charged months, during which time the princess’s marriage, already disintegrating, crumbled under the strain of caring for her difficult guest. There were frequent arguments, and Frau Tchaikovsky’s unpredictable moods and volatility infected the already fragile household.25 Xenia foolishly promised the claimant that she would somehow arrange a meeting with the dowager empress in Copenhagen, an assurance she could not keep.26 But it was not just the claimant’s behavior, a brok
en promise, or a fractured marriage that led to the break. Xenia’s real mistake was in allowing Gleb Botkin unrestricted access to Frau Tchaikovsky. Much of the animosity and misunderstanding that arose at Kenwood over these months, at least as far as Xenia Georgievna was concerned, was due solely to his persistently stubborn and invidious intervention.
The problems began on Botkin’s return to America from Seeon, as he published a series of articles about the claimant. Interest in her story was so high, particularly in the United States, that, as Gleb recalled, he was “swamped with requests for articles,” and a good deal of possible income was bandied about to tempt him. He was at first guarded, even refusing offers that would have considerably enriched him personally.27 Over time, however, his reliance on Rathlef-Keilmann, and presumption that she had provided an accurate accounting of events, led to exaggeration. The duke of Leuchtenberg personally protested one of Gleb’s articles, insisting that he had been extensively misquoted, a point that Botkin apparently conceded.28 But being successfully challenged did nothing to stop what many came to see as Botkin’s increasing recklessness. After one such story, Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich complained, “The tone of the last part of the article is absolutely unwarranted. . . . Gleb is no longer relying here on facts but on notoriously untrue gossip. Has Gleb really not got enough feeling and tact to understand how inappropriate, even harmful, it is for a Russian to sling mud at his own people in the columns of the foreign press? His insinuations against the Grand Duke of Hesse I find equally distasteful. . . . He is completely ruining the invalid.”29
But Gleb saw enemies everywhere, and he felt certain that the Romanovs were simply denying the claimant so they could obtain any money deposited in Europe by Nicholas II. With an eye to protecting what he thought were her rights, Gleb became increasingly strident in pushing Frau Tchaikovsky to make a claim on the reputed Romanov fortune. At first his visits to Kenwood and to the claimant were cordial, though he disagreed with Xenia Georgievna’s cautious approach in advancing the case; soon he apparently complained to the claimant that the princess did not have her best interests at heart. In her suspicious state, Frau Tchaikovsky was always susceptible to any slight, whether real or perceived, and began to vent her anger on her luckless hostess. The situation quickly devolved into shouting matches among the trio, with Xenia accusing Gleb of hoping to exploit the claimant for publicity, and Gleb charging Xenia with keeping her a virtual prisoner at Kenwood on orders from the Romanovs. There were absurd, dueling press conferences and statements among the warring parties that helped no one, least of all the claimant.30 Gleb later insisted that at one point Xenia had told him that Grand Duchesses Xenia and Olga Alexandrovna, aware that the claimant was their niece, were willing to give her a large financial settlement and provide for her if she would consent to drop her claim and thus pave the way for them to obtain any funds deposited by Nicholas II in Europe.31
This, Xenia Georgievna insisted, was a lie, nonsense. “I would never, never have said such a thing,” she later declared. “The attitude of my aunts was too negative to imagine them proposing such a thing.”32 Few actually believed Botkin’s version of events, but the damage was done. He continued to poison the claimant against her hostess, and soon enough, the situation at Kenwood reached the breaking point. Whether it was Xenia Georgievna or her husband, William Leeds, who finally asked the claimant to leave, or if it was Frau Tchaikovsky’s own rash decision, in August she fled the estate with Gleb. “You know,” Xenia later said, “she isn’t normal.”33
Frau Tchaikovsky didn’t go far, checking into the Garden City Hotel on Long Island on August 10, 1928. To evade any curious reporters, Botkin registered the claimant as “Mrs. Eugene Anderson”; soon this evolved into “Anna Anderson.”34 A porter named Walter Ruch was deputized to tend to her needs, as he could speak to her in German; this suggests that her fluency in English was still less than satisfactory. As opposed to those who had deemed her German atrocious, Ruch found that she spoke “very good” German, though he noted that she seemed to carry “a foreign accent.”35
And it was Gleb Botkin who now tried to rescue her from the legal and financial limbo that had dominated the previous decade of her life. He retained Edward Fallows, a corporate lawyer from New York City, to pursue the claimant’s possible financial interests. Ten years had passed since the executions in Ekaterinburg, and Gleb suspected that surviving Romanovs might attempt to lodge inheritance suits against any potential European funds. Contrary to what many elected to believe, Botkin urged this path not because he was personally avaricious and hoped to profit should any such accounts be found but rather from genuine concern over the claimant’s future. He himself had little money and could not afford to care for her, yet some provision had to be made for her security. When Fallows drew up a will for Anderson that summer, she named—without their knowledge—Gleb and his sister Tatiana as her principal beneficiaries; Gleb somehow got wind of this and had Fallows draft a document naming the American Red Cross as recipient should he receive any money through the claimant.36
Edward Fallows, the first lawyer to take on Anderson’s case.
The money issue: from this point forward, it hung like a millstone around Anderson’s neck, confirmation—to those who suspected her of fraud—that the claim was nothing more than an unseemly attempt to lay her hands on the mythical Romanov fortune. Whatever money had existed in Russia before the Revolution was gone—on that much everyone agreed—but what of Romanov funds deposited abroad? There had been money, a commingling of both governmental and private assets—a distinction lost on the autocratically minded Nicholas and Alexandra—in the Bank of England, the Mendelssohn Bank in Berlin, and probably other institutions, at least in 1914. The funds in Germany were frozen, and those in England, at least according to the Romanovs, were patriotically brought back to finance the war effort; in fact, money remained in the Bank of England, as the British ambassador to Russia, Sir George Buchanan, frequently delivered large sums to the empress.37
But the questions of what if anything remained—and in which institutions—became as enigmatic as the claim of Anna Anderson. She told Fallows that Nicholas II had deposited 5 million rubles for herself and each of her three sisters in the Bank of England, to be used as dowries, something she said she had told Olga Alexandrovna during her visits.38 Discovery of this supposed fortune, so many of Anderson’s supporters held, had led the avaricious Romanovs in exile to deny that she was Anastasia.39
“It was all fantastic and terribly vulgar,” said Olga Alexandrovna. “Would my mother have accepted a pension from King George V if we had any money in England? It does not make sense.”40 Yet her sister Xenia Alexandrovna at least wondered if it might be true, to the extent that she hired two lawyers to seek out any deposits made by her late brother that could then be claimed.41 No one, on either side, ever found any fortune hidden in the Bank of England or any other British bank, but, as with so much in Anderson’s case, it was belief rather than fact that continued to fuel the conspiratorial fires. Gleb Botkin’s determined and overt pursuit of this mythical fortune on behalf of the claimant seemed, to many, at best unseemly and at worst deeply suspicious. Gleb, who so frequently and freely hurled libelous insults and accusations at those he deemed “Anastasia’s” enemies, thus gave the impression that he was some Machiavellian character intent on using Anderson for financial gain. Such assumptions were erroneous, but great damage was done when Fallows organized the Grandanor Corporation that summer of 1928; in exchange for large financial contributions to fund the claimant and pay her legal fees, those who donated received a certain number of shares in the corporation. If and when the rumored Romanov fortune was found, these shareholders would be duly rewarded according to their contributions.42 To many, this reduced the presumed struggle of a damaged young woman’s sincere efforts to reclaim a lost past to the unfortunate appearance of a treasure hunt.
And it was this—the possibility that Botkin and Fallows would attempt to force the is
sue in a court of law—that drove Princess Xenia Georgievna to write a desperate letter to Empress Alexandra’s sister Victoria, marchioness of Milford Haven, begging her to assume financial responsibility for the claimant and thus prevent such an unseemly circus. To this, though, Victoria replied, “I have given much thought to what you have written about the situation of A (as I also shall call her in this letter), and the action you suggest I should take, and have also discussed the question with Irene. . . . I am quite unable to look upon her as being really my niece, and I assure you solemnly that I should have rejoiced if I could have thought otherwise, for I really loved my poor sister Alix’s children, whom I saw nearly every year before the war and met for the last time at its outbreak. Not lightly nor with prejudice have I come to my conclusion. . . . The question of supporting A by money or otherwise in order to save us from much possible unpleasantness—a danger you warn me of, has to be considered. I have come to the conclusion that I cannot follow your suggestion and must face any risks this refusal may entail. People claiming to be one or the other member of that martyred family are certain to continue turning up. . . . I cannot myself nor advise any of my relatives to take up the burden of responsibility for A’s future life and actions.”43
Nothing happened, and neither side seemed willing to force the issue of Anderson’s identity until the autumn of 1928. That October, Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna died in Copenhagen. Within twenty-four hours, the Romanovs in Denmark as well as former grand duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse in Darmstadt issued a statement that had obviously been prepared in advance. Citing the negative opinions of Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, and Pierre and Alexandra Gilliard, it categorically rejected the claimant, declaring, “It is our firm conviction that the woman who calls herself Mrs. Anastasia Tchaikovsky, and who is at present in the United States, is not Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna.” It was, the statement said, “very difficult and painful for us, the nearest relatives of the Tsar’s family, to accept the idea that not a single member of that family survived. We would willingly believe that one at least escaped from their murderous extermination in 1918. We would heap on the survivor that love of ours which has had no object on which to expend itself all these years. And with our great love we would drown our great sorrow that it has not been our lot to be able to protect the pure in heart, these models of goodness and love, from the slanderous tongues of their enemies. But our sense of duty compels us to state that as far as the woman in question is concerned, her story is a pure invention. Our memory of the dear departed must not be doubted by allowing this fantastic tale to be spread abroad and gain substance.” Thirteen members of the Romanov family signed the Danish version: Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna; her sister Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna and her husband, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich; their six sons, Princes Andrei, Feodor, Nikita, Dimitri, Rostislav, and Vassili Alexandrovich; their daughter, Princess Irina Alexandrovna, and her husband, Prince Felix Yusupov; and Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich and his sister Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, first cousins to Nicholas II. The version issued in Darmstadt carried the additional signatures of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse and his two sisters, Victoria, marchioness of Milford Haven, and Princess Irene of Prussia.44 But of this roster, only three—Olga Alexandrovna, Princess Irene of Prussia, and Prince Felix Yusupov—had actually met the claimant.