The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  On October 18, 1963, the cover of Life, the nation’s most prominent and widely read weekly magazine, displayed a picture of Nicholas II’s five children. The headline was “THE CASE OF A NEW ANASTASIA: IS A LADY FROM CHICAGO THE TSAR’S DAUGHTER?” Inside, across ten pages, Life excerpted a new book, Anastasia, the Autobiography of the Grand Duchess of Russia, and summarized the life of its author, a woman who called herself Eugenia Smith. For forty years this woman had lived in Illinois, the final seventeen as the permanent guest of a wealthy woman, Mrs. William Emery, whose family owned the Chicago Rawhide Company. Mrs. Emery believed that her house-guest was Grand Duchess Anastasia. She took Mrs. Smith on trips to Europe and always solemnly celebrated her birthday on June 18, Anastasia’s birthday. Mrs. Smith lived with Mrs. Emery from 1945 until June 1963, when, having inherited money from her benefactress, she moved to New York City to help with the publication of her book.

  During her years in Illinois, Mrs. Smith received only slight attention from the press and public. She had no support from a local Romanov, but here the fault was her own. When stories appeared, announcing that Grand Duchess Anastasia was living in Elmhurst, Prince Rostislav of Russia, Nicholas II’s nephew, also happened to be living in Chicago. His first wife, Alexandra, had divorced him and married Lawrence Armour, a banker. Mrs. Armour heard that one of her former husband’s relatives was living nearby in Elmhurst, so she phoned and invited Mrs. Smith to lunch. The party, she said, would also include her ex-husband, because Prince Rostislav was eager to see his cousin Anastasia, who had been a childhood playmate. Three times Mrs. Armour issued this invitation; each time Mrs. Smith developed a headache and declined to go, explaining that she was too nervous to see her cousin.

  When Eugenia Smith first brought her manuscript to her publisher, Robert Speller & Sons in New York, she did not claim to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. Instead, she said that she had been a friend of the grand duchess, who, before she died in 1920, had entrusted her with personal notes. Soon afterward, Mrs. Smith amended her tale: now she became the grand duchess. She said that she had escaped from Ekaterinburg and Russia to Rumania. In October 1918—three months after the Ekaterinburg massacre—she married a Croatian Catholic, Marijan Smetisko. One child, a daughter, had died in infancy. In 1922, she received her husband’s permission to come to America; her immigration papers that year listed her as Eugenia Smetisko. She landed in New York, stopped briefly in Detroit, and then went to Chicago. Her marriage dissolved a few years later, and she became a salesgirl, a model, a milliner, a lecturer, and a seller of perfume. During World War II, she became a U.S. citizen and worked in a defense plant. After the war, she moved in with Mrs. Emery.

  Life presented the story as a mystery, still unsolved, and offered evidence for and against its subject. A polygraph expert, hired by the magazine, questioned Mrs. Smith for thirty hours and then declared that he was virtually positive his subject was Anastasia. Two anthropologists, comparing photographs of Anastasia and Mrs. Smith, declared that they could not possibly be pictures of the same woman. A graphologist, studying handwriting samples, agreed with the anthropologists. Princess Nina Chavchavzdze, a cousin who had played with Anastasia in Russia until both were thirteen, met Mrs. Smith and also concluded that she was bogus. Tatiana Botkin, daughter of the tsar’s doctor, killed with the family, read Mrs. Smith’s book and compiled a twenty-page list of specific errors; she also pointed out a number of remarkable similarities between passages in her own book about the Imperial family and passages in Mrs. Smith’s book. Life located a Croatian named Marijan Smetisko through the address listed in Mrs. Smith’s immigration papers; he said that he had never known any woman named Eugenia and had never been married to anyone other than his current wife.

  Two months after the Life article was published, Colonel Goleniewski appeared on Eugenia Smith’s doorstep. At that time, Goleniewski was still under wraps at the CIA, and no one in America outside the intelligence agency and the FBI had heard of him. On December 28, 1963, he phoned Mrs. Smith’s publisher and asked for an appointment to see her. He did not use the name Goleniewski; instead, he called himself Mr. Borg. Mrs. Smith agreed, and a meeting between the two pretenders, supposedly brother and sister, took place on December 31. Goleniewski said that he had been trying for two years to get the CIA to help him find his sister in America. He told her briefly about his life and brought her up to date on their family: “Your sister Marie is in Warsaw … Mother died in Warsaw.… In 1952, I buried our father with my own hands. He was a very good Russian man.… I was two times a child because of my sickness.”

  Mrs. Smith listened for a while and then burst out passionately, “He knows. He knows. He is my brother Alexis. My darling. My darling.”

  This emotional meeting was followed by three more during the next several weeks, during which time Mrs. Smith called Goleniewski “my brother, Alexis.” But an awkward fact intruded on their relationship: in her book, Mrs. Smith had said that she was the only Romanov to survive Ekaterinburg. Her publisher pointed out that public recognition of the man as her brother would require Mrs. Smith to admit that she had not told the truth. Mrs. Smith refused to change her story, and, inevitably, the relationship between the “siblings” began to deteriorate.

  Michael Goleniewski and Eugenia Smith did not see each other again, but he continued to assert that she was his sister Anastasia. Later, he reported that she had died in New York City in 1968. She was murdered, he said, after a visit by “very powerful men … two of them were Rockefellers.”*

  The women who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia were challenged by relatives who tested their memories, anthropologists who measured their faces, and graphologists who studied their handwriting. The men aspiring to be accepted as the Tsarevich Alexis faced a more difficult test. Nicholas II’s only son suffered from hemophilia. This is a hereditary, noncurable disease, transmitted by mothers to their sons. It meant that the tsarevich’s blood did not clot as does most people’s. A bump or bruise rupturing a tiny vessel beneath the skin could begin a slow seepage of blood into surrounding muscle and tissue. Instead of clotting quickly, the blood would have continued to flow, creating a swelling or hematoma, sometimes as big as an orange or a grapefruit. There were no transfusions of blood or blood fraction—as there are today—which could halt the bleeding. Eventually, when the skin was filled with blood, pressure on the torn vessel would slow the hemorrhage and allow a clot to form. Then, over weeks, the process of reabsorption would take place, turning the skin from a shiny purple to a mottled yellow-green. A simple scratch on a finger was not dangerous. Minor cuts and scratches anywhere on the surface of the body were treated with pressure and tight bandaging, which pinched off the blood and permitted the flesh to heal over. Exceptions were hemorrhages inside the mouth or nose, areas which could not be bandaged.

  The permanent crippling effect of Alexis’s hemophilia came from bleeding into the joints. Blood entering the confined space of an elbow, a knee, or an ankle caused pressure on the nerves, which inflicted intense pain. Sometimes the cause of the injury was apparent, sometimes not. In either case, Alexis awakened in the morning and called out, “Mama, I cannot walk today” or “Mama, I cannot bend my elbow.” At first, as the limb flexed, leaving the largest possible area in the joint socket for the inflowing fluids, the pain was small. Then, as the space filled, it began to hurt. When the pain obliterated everything else from his consciousness, Alexis still was able to cry, “Mama, help me, help me!” Doctors were summoned, ice packs applied, prayers offered. Nothing helped. Then Gregory Rasputin, the Siberian peasant reported to have miraculous powers of faith healing, was brought to Alexandra.

  Each bleeding episode added to the damage. Once inside a joint, blood had a corrosive effect, destroying bone, cartilage, and tissue. As bone formation changed, limbs locked in bent positions. There was no rehabilitation other than rest and waiting for the hematoma to be reabsorbed. The best therapy was constant exercise and massage, but this risked recommencing th
e hemorrhage. When Alexis reached age five, two sailors from the Imperial navy were assigned to protect him every minute. When he was sick, they carried him; many photographs and movies of Imperial ceremonies under Nicholas II depict the tsar and the empress walking along, nodding and bowing, followed by a large sailor carrying a handsome six-, eight-, or ten-year-old boy.

  When the revolution came, this protection and care were stripped away. One of the two sailor-attendants deserted; the other eventually was taken and shot. Alexis was well during the first seven months of the family’s imprisonment in Tobolsk. Then, in April, seeking an outlet for his energy, he carried a sled to the top of an indoor staircase and rode it down. He fell and began to bleed into the groin. During the remaining four months of his life, he could not walk. When a troop of cavalry arrived in Tobolsk, sent by Moscow to bring the Imperial family to the capital, Alexis was too ill to travel and was left behind. Three weeks later, he joined his parents in Ekaterinburg. During the family’s final imprisonment in the Ipatiev House, Alexis remained most of the day in bed in his parents’ room. On the night of July 16, 1918, when Yurovsky came for the family, Nicholas carried his son down the stairs into the cellar.

  It is inconceivable that a hemophiliac could survive the carnage in Ipatiev’s cellar. Nevertheless, if—somehow—Alexis had been saved and had been carried thousands of miles to political safety, his medical prospects still would have been dismal. Hemophiliacs born at the beginning of this century spent much of their lives in beds and wheelchairs, their limbs contorted by permanent joint damage. Many perished by the time they were twenty; most others were dead before thirty. Today, hemophilia can be treated, but it cannot be cured.

  * Dr. Wiener died many years ago, and his files have vanished. One of his colleagues, Dr. Richard Rosenfield, said, “I’m not at all sure that Al Wiener was competent to make such a diagnosis. It was not his area of expertise at all. He tried to get by with everything in clinical medicine, but he was more or less incompetent except in the field of blood typing, and there, of course, he was exceptionally good.”

  * In fact, in 1995, Eugenia Smith was still alive, living in Newport, R.I. Asked whether she wished to give blood so that her DNA profile could be compared to that of Empress Alexandra and the three Imperial daughters, she declined.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE CLAIMANT

  Mrs. Tchaikovsky is either Grand Duchess Anastasia or a miracle.

  —Ambassador Sergei Botkin, president of the Russian Refugee Office in Berlin, 1926

  One Romanov claim stood apart from the others. From her appearance in 1920 to her death in 1984, the identity of the woman known variously as Fräulein Unbekannt (Miss Unknown), Mrs. Alexander Tschaikovsky, Anna Anderson, Anastasia Manahan, and Franziska Schanzkowska was one of the celebrated mysteries of the twentieth century. She insisted that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, Nicholas II’s youngest daughter. The survivors of the revolution, some of whom had known Anastasia well, disagreed passionately among themselves about the legitimacy of this claim. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grand dukes, grand duchesses, former ladies-in-waiting, former nursemaids, tutors, army officers, officers of the Imperial yacht, even Nicholas II’s former mistress, were called upon or presented themselves to give opinions. They made declarations, signed affidavits, gave interviews, and wrote books. Her cause called up devotion and personal sacrifice from an international legion of supporters. At the same time, it brought down, upon her, her supporters, and her opponents, denunciation, lawsuits, and, in some cases, financial ruin. When she died, the solution appeared no closer than it had been sixty-four years earlier, when she first appeared.

  At nine o’clock on the night of February 17, 1920—nineteen months after the murders in Ekaterinburg—a young woman jumped twenty feet from a bridge into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. A policeman saw her, rescued her, and took her to a hospital. She had no purse, no papers, no identification of any kind. Questioned when she recovered, she refused to say who she was, where she lived, or how she supported herself. When the police persisted, she pulled a blanket over her face and turned to the wall. After six weeks, she was sent to Dalldorf Mental Asylum as Fräulein Unbekannt and placed in a ward with fourteen other women. On arrival, her height was five feet, two inches, her weight, 110 pounds. Medical examination showed that her body was covered with scars and, so the doctors believed, that she was not a virgin. Her teeth were in poor condition, and seven or eight were extracted by asylum dentists.

  She remained in Dalldorf for over two years. After months of silence, she began to talk to some of the nurses. Later, one—a Russian-speaking German—said that she spoke Russian “like a native.” In the autumn of 1921, turning through an illustrated magazine containing pictures of the Russian Imperial family, the patient asked another nurse whether she noticed any resemblance between herself and the tsar’s youngest daughter. When the nurse agreed that there was a resemblance, the patient declared that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia. Word filtered out of the hospital that Grand Duchess Tatiana was present, and Baroness Buxhoevden, a former lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra, came to see her. When the patient refused to speak and hid beneath her blanket, the baroness roughly pulled back the cover and then stormed away, declaring, “She’s too short to be Tatiana.” Subsequently, the patient told her nurses again that she was Anastasia. At the end of May 1922, Fräulein Unbekannt left Dalldorf and went to live in a small Berlin apartment with a Russian Baltic baron and his wife. Soon the baron’s parlor was filled with other Russian emigres eager to see her for themselves and listen to her story.

  According to her, when the bodies of her family were being carried from the cellar, one of the soldiers noticed that, although unconscious, she was still alive. This man, a Pole who assumed the name of Alexander Tschaikovsky, carried her, assisted by his brother Sergei, to his house in Ekaterinburg. Soon after, Alexander, Sergei, their mother, sister, and the semiconscious young woman fled Ekaterinburg in a peasant cart. Four and a half months and two thousand miles later, they crossed the border into Rumania and settled in Bucharest. There, to her distress, the young woman discovered that she was pregnant. Tschaikovsky confessed to rape. When the child, a son, was born out of wedlock, the mother wanted only to be rid of it. At the age of three months, the baby was handed over to Tschaikovsky’s mother and sister. “My only desire was that it would be taken away,” the baby’s mother said. The infant was placed in an orphanage and, thereafter, vanished from history and legend. At some point, according to one version of this tale, the mother and Alexander Tschaikovsky were married in a ceremony supposedly performed in a Roman Catholic church. Not long after, she said, Tschaikovsky was killed in a street fight in Bucharest.

  The young woman said that she decided to go to Berlin to ask for help from Empress Alexandra’s sister Princess Irene of Prussia, who was Grand Duchess Anastasia’s godmother as well as her aunt. Because she had no passport and no money, a male companion, possibly Sergei Tschaikovsky, helped her to walk across Europe, crossing borders at night to avoid detection. Reaching Berlin, she went to Princess Irene’s Netherlands Palace. Standing alone before the gates, she decided that her aunt probably was not at home and that no one inside would recognize her. In a moment of despair, she threw herself into the canal.

  That was her story of her escape. A subsequent check of the names of the guards at the Ipatiev House revealed no Alexander Tschaikovsky, nor, indeed, was there a family named Tschaikovsky living in or near Ekaterinburg in 1918. During the 1920s, researchers in Bucharest discovered no trace of any Tschaikovsky living in that city, nor any record of a marriage and birth recorded under that name, nor any record of a murder or death in the streets or anywhere else of a man by the name. For Grand Duchess Anastasia to have spent months in Bucharest and not have appealed to Queen Marie of Rumania, who was a first cousin of both her father and her mother, whom she had seen in June 1914, when there was talk of a marriage between the Russian and Rumanian families, was, according to Marie’s daughter,
“unexplainable.”

  The claimant later said that she did not go to the queen in Bucharest because she was pregnant and ashamed. Anastasia’s aunt Grand Duchess Olga rejected that excuse, saying, “In 1918 or 1919,

  Queen Marie would have recognized Anastasia on the spot.… Marie would never have been shocked at anything, and a niece of mine would have known it.… My niece would have known that her condition would indeed have shocked [Princess] Irene.” Thus, Olga found it unthinkable that a daughter of the tsar would turn her back on Queen Marie and walk across Europe to seek out Princess Irene.

  All in all, “the escape” was perhaps the least verifiable of the chapters of the Anastasia legend; it had to be accepted on faith—as it was by her supporters—or rejected as wildly improbable—as it was by her opponents. In the end, it was no longer an issue. Those on either side of the argument were not interested in how she got away from the cellar. They wanted to know who she was.

  Anastasia Nicholaevna, the fourth and youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, was born on June 18, 1901. Her older sisters Olga and Tatiana occupied the positions of authority among the Imperial children; her third sister, Marie, was gentle, merry, and flirtatious; this left Anastasia, a short, dumpy, blue-eyed child, to make her family reputation as a rebel and a wag. When the saluting cannon on the Imperial yacht fired at sunset, Anastasia retreated into a corner, stuck her fingers in her ears, widened her eyes, and lolled her tongue in mock terror. Quick-witted and comical, she was also stubborn, mischievous, and impertinent. The same gift of ear and tongue that made her quickest among her sisters to pick up good pronunciation in foreign languages equipped her admirably as a mimic. She aped, sometimes cruelly, the speech and mannerisms of those about her. She climbed trees, refusing to come down until specifically commanded to do so by her father. She rarely cried. Her aunt Grand Duchess Olga remembered a time when Anastasia was teasing so ruthlessly that she slapped the child. The little girl’s face went crimson, but instead of crying she ran soundlessly out of the room. Sometimes, Anastasia’s practical jokes went too far. Once she rolled a rock into a snowball and threw it at Tatiana. The missile hit her sister in the face and knocked her, stunned, to the ground. Frightened, at last Anastasia cried.