The Romanovs

by Robert K. Massie

  Three months later, on February 12, 1984, Anastasia Manahan died of pneumonia. Her body was cremated that afternoon, and in the spring her ashes were buried in the churchyard at Castle Seeon. Manahan died six years later.

  At her death, the controversy over Anna Anderson’s identity was unresolved. Unknowingly, however, she left behind a piece of evidence that would tell the world who she was.

  * The few people who subsequently saw the questions and answers always refused to describe them.

  * Fallows looked elsewhere in Europe for money and for evidence that the tsar’s youngest daughter had escaped. On October 7, 1935, he wrote to Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor, saying that “by a miracle she escaped from Yurovsky and the other Jews who murdered her family” and that Hitler’s Interior Ministry might have in its files “a confession of the Jew, Yurovsky, who was the leader of the Jewish assassins.” Hitler, whom Fallows addressed as “Honored Sir” and “Esteemed Sir,” never replied.

  * Baring Brothers did not deny that for seventy years it held millions of pounds of Russian money. On November 7, 1917, the day the Bolsheviks seized power, the British government froze 4 million pounds deposited at Baring Brothers by the Imperial government. Over the years, interest ballooned this sum to 62 million pounds. In July 1986, in the era of glasnost and perestroika, the governments of Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher decided to wipe the slate clean and use this sum to pay off British holders of Russian Imperial bonds and British and Commonwealth claimants who had lost property or other assets in Russia because of the revolution. The list of claimants was very long: 37,000. The list of items of lost property was even longer: 60,000. It ran in importance from oil wells, banks, factories, insurance companies, ships, gold, and copper and coal mines to personal jewelry, furniture, automobiles, and bank balances. One claimant demanded reimbursement for five dozen pair of stockings left behind, another for season tickets for ten performances of the opera which he was unable to attend because of the revolution. A Briton owning an orchard in Russia declared that he had awakened one morning to find his orchard filled with soldiers; his assets, the file recorded, “were consumed.” Another Briton asked to be reimbursed because he had lost his parrot.

  Between 1987 and 1990, these claims were investigated, values established, and exchange rates calculated. Eventually, bondholders and property owners were compensated at a rate of 54.78 percent of their original value.

  The existence of this large sum of “tsarist government money” may or may not have been the source of the rumors about “Romanov family money.” Even today, there are those who argue that, because the tsar was titled Autocrat of all the Russias, he personally owned Russia: land, property, bank accounts—everything. The deposits at Baring Brothers, these people say, therefore belonged to him or his heirs. Russian constitutional law does not support this opinion.

  * One witness who had known Grand Duchess Anastasia better than Lili Dehn, Baroness Buxhoevden, Pierre Gilliard, or Sidney Gibbes, and perhaps as well as Grand Duchess Olga or Shura Tegleva, was never asked to testify, by either the claimant’s supporters or her opponents. This was Alexandra’s closest friend, Anna Vyrubova, whose role with respect to the empress was something between that of a younger sister and an oldest child. Anna had lived in a small house across the street from the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo and spent her days with the empress and her evenings with the family. She accompanied them on vacations in the Crimea and aboard the Imperial yacht in the Baltic. She would have accompanied the family to Siberia had she not first been arrested by Alexander Kerensky and imprisoned for five months in the Peter and Paul Fortress.

  Vyrubova was released, departed Russia, and lived in Finland until her death in 1964 at the age of eighty. Her testimony was never sought in the Anna Anderson debate because she had been a friend and disciple of Gregory Rasputin, whose behavior had scandalized Russia before the revolution. “It was our belief,” said Tatiana Botkin, “that Madame Vyrubova’s involvement … could only hurt Anastasia’s cause in the eyes of the Russian emigration, which, for the most part, had profoundly despised Rasputin.”

  CHAPTER 15

  A MATTER OF FAMILY HONOR

  Four and a half years before her death, Anastasia Manahan underwent a severe medical crisis. On August 20, 1979, after several days of vomiting and stubbornly refusing help, she was rushed to Charlottesville’s Martha Jefferson Hospital. Dr. Richard Shrum operated immediately. He found obstruction and gangrene in the small intestine, caused by attachment to an ovarian tumor. He removed almost one foot of the intestine, resectioned the bowel, and closed the wound. Mrs. Manahan was a difficult patient. At first, after surgery, she repeatedly pulled tubes from her body. Eventually, her behavior improved. “She remained reclusive, did not like to talk to people, and smiled rarely,” Shrum recalled. “She would sit around with a handkerchief held up to her nose as if she were afraid of catching something.”

  Immediately after the operation, Shrum followed standard hospital procedure and sent the tissue he had removed to the pathology laboratory, which retained five inches of the intestine. This tissue was divided into five one-inch segments, and each segment was bathed in a tissue preservative called formalin, sealed inside a block of paraffin wax one inch square and half an inch deep, and placed in a small blue and white box on a shelf filled with other similar boxes containing tissue specimens. The purpose of preserving excised tissue after surgery is purely medical: should the same or a similar condition recur, having actual tissue previously removed can be an invaluable diagnostic tool. In 1979, the Martha Jefferson Hospital pathology laboratory was new, having opened only the year before. “We have kept everything since it opened,” said a hospital employee, “every sample from all patients, regardless of who the patient is.” Once stored, tissue specimens, like written medical records, remain legally the property of the hospital. The hospital, observing a fiduciary obligation to the patient and the patient’s family and heirs, guards these materials fiercely. Any release of records or specimens to anyone other than the patient, family, heirs, or executors, requires a court order.

  After Dr. William Maples’ July 1992 announcement that Grand Duchess Anastasia was missing from the grave in Ekaterinburg received international publicity, it was perhaps not surprising that exploratory probes as to whether Martha Jefferson Hospital possessed any of Anastasia Manahan’s blood or tissue samples began. On September 22, Syd Mandelbaum, a Long Island blood analysis expert connected with several major laboratories, wrote to the hospital that he intended to write a book on the use of DNA testing as a forensic tool and wished to include a chapter on Anna Anderson. “As remote as this sounds,” Mandelbaum’s letter declared, “we are trying to obtain a genetic sample … in the form of a blood sample, follicular hair, or tissue culture” to test at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory or at Harvard Medical School. D. D. Sandridge, the executive vice president of Martha Jefferson Hospital, replied to Mandelbaum that “we have nothing here that could be useful to you.” Later the hospital explained this mistake to me as a clerical error: “The wrong person was asked to look for it.”

  The right person to ask was Penny Jenkins, the director of medical records, and it was she who dealt with the next two applicants Who inquired about the tissue. The first of these, writing in November 1992, was Mary DeWitt, who described herself as “a student of forensic pathology at the University of Texas” and said that she would like the tissue because she was “writing a paper.” Jenkins assumed that De Witt was a young student, “writing a paper like my daughter in high school. It was not a case of ‘medical need to know’ or ‘patient care,’ ” Jenkins decided, “so I said, ‘No, I can’t help you.’ ” Mary DeWitt, however, did not go away. Instead, she contacted James Blair Lovell, a Washington author who had written the last Anastasia biography, and explained to him that she knew that the hospital had the tissue but that she needed the cooperation of the Manahan family in order to obtain the required court order. Proposing to Lovell t
hat they work together, she offered to pay for a lawyer if Lovell would approach the Manahans. Lovell agreed and obtained a letter from John Manahan’s cousin Fred Manahan, granting him authority to dispose of the tissue. DeWitt retained a Charlottesville lawyer. In the spring of 1993, however, DeWitt wrote to Penny Jenkins that, henceforth, she, Mary DeWitt, would deal with the hospital on anything to do with the tissue, while James Lovell’s role would be restricted to that of a historian recording the process. Lovell, hearing about this letter, became enraged and said to Jenkins, “They’re cutting me out!” Jenkins had to choose. “Because I felt that Jimmy Lovell’s agenda was a little bit cleaner, I decided that we weren’t going to communicate anymore with Mary DeWitt,” she said. Jenkins never heard again from Mary DeWitt, but later she was told that DeWitt was a woman in her forties, the wife of a private investigator.

  Two days after receiving her first letter from Mary DeWitt, Jenkins received a telephone call from Dr. Willi Korte, who identified himself as a German lawyer and historical researcher. He told her that he was associated with the Forensic Institute of the University of Munich and was working as part of an international team to identify the Ekaterinburg bones and solve the mystery of Anastasia. “He was very smooth, very charming,” Jenkins remembered. “He dropped a lot of names: Dr. Maples in Florida … Dr. Baden in New York … and others. He told me that his job was to wander around the world looking for comparative tissue samples. He asked whether we had any. I said, ‘Yes, we do have a specimen.’ A short time after that, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, Thomas Kline, of the firm of Andrews & Kurth, called to ask about the tissue. Kline said that Korte, with whom he worked, was out of the country. I repeated to him, ‘Yes, we do have the tissue.’ That was the last I heard from either of them,” said Jenkins. “I never saw Korte again until we were sitting in court. Then he did not speak to me.”

  In January 1993, Thomas Kline contacted Fred Manahan, who Kline believed controlled the tissue. Manahan referred Kline to James Lovell. On April 1.6, after several telephone conversations, Kline wrote a three-page letter to Lovell, formally asking for help in obtaining access to Anastasia Manahan’s tissue for DNA testing to be done by the Forensic Institute in Munich. He said that the institute already had access to a number of living relatives of the Imperial family whose blood could be used to make DNA comparisons. To buttress his appeal, Kline cited two scientific articles which dealt with DNA analysis. One was the work of the British Forensic Science Service team led by Dr. Peter Gill. On June 18, Kline wrote to Lovell again to clarify Dr. Willi Korte’s role in the Munich institute’s investigation. Korte, Kline said, was an experienced researcher, not a medical doctor. Kline added that the Munich institute had established working relationships with forensic scientists in the United States, “in particular, Dr. Mary-Claire King, [who] has agreed to work with the Forensic Institute.”

  James Lovell found his encounters with Thomas Kline alarming. Unsure of his own legal status, Lovell consulted Richard Schweitzer, a Virginia attorney, who, like Lovell, believed in Mrs. Manahan’s claim to be the tsar’s daughter. Speaking of Kline, Lovell told Schweitzer, “He’s just harassing me to death. He keeps saying, ‘We have to have an answer! We just can’t leave it! We must act! We must have an answer from you right now!’ ” Lovell asked Schweitzer what he ought to do. “Jimmy, you don’t have to do anything,” Schweitzer advised. “You don’t even have to talk to him on the phone.” “So,” Schweitzer said later, “the next time the man called, Jimmy—on his own, I didn’t tell him to do it—did the best thing he could do. When he heard, ‘You’ve got to answer right now, yes or no!’ Jimmy said, ‘Then the answer is no,’ and hung up. Then Jimmy said to me, ‘Do you think I did right? What can they do next?’ And I said, ‘Jimmy, they can’t do anything. They don’t have any standing. They cannot participate in a lawsuit in the State of Virginia unless they have standing. The only person I know of who’s a resident of this state, who can come in and have any connection with this case, is Marina.’ ”

  Marina Botkina Schweitzer, Gleb Botkin’s daughter, is a Virginia gentlewoman with a quiet demeanor and soft southern accent. Her Russian origins, not immediately apparent to outsiders, are of profound importance to her. Her great-grandfather, Dr. Sergei Botkin, was the father of Russian clinical medicine and the friend and personal physician of Tsar Alexander II; her grandfather, Dr. Eugene Botkin, played the same role for Tsar Nicholas II and, as a consequence of his loyalty, died with the Imperial family in the cellar in Ekaterinburg. She reads and speaks Russian and German and every day sits down to watch the Vremenya evening news broadcast from Moscow on cable TV. The only daughter among Gleb’s four children, Marina was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island, and graduated from Smith College. While working in a law office in Charlottesville, she met her future husband, Richard Schweitzer.

  Schweitzer, who, on his wife’s behalf, was to fight a single-handed court battle with a nationwide law firm employing 250 attorneys, is of Swiss descent. His ancestors came to America from the canton of Basel in the early nineteenth century, intending, as religious missionaries, to convert Indians in Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Virginia and served for four years during World War II on antisubmarine duty in the North Atlantic. For a while, he was a member of a secret U.S. Navy raiding team, trained to blow up German U-boat pens. Schweitzer practiced law in the field of international reinsurance and finance and retired in 1990. At seventy-three, he is feisty and, when aroused, fierce. He has a straight back, a sharp face behind rimless glasses, and thinning white hair. His language is lawyerly, but underneath there is an ironic sense of humor. In the lawsuit that was to come, Richard Schweitzer’s opponents tended to patronize him and treat him as a small-town country lawyer. They made a mistake.

  The woman called Anna Anderson had been a part of Marina Schweitzer’s life since Marina was five, when her father visited the claimant at Castle Seeon. Marina knew the claimant slightly when Anna Anderson was in America at the end of the 1920s. In the 1950s, Schweitzer said, “when she was living in poverty in the Black Forest, we put money in envelopes and sent it to her by registered mail. Finally, somebody wrote to Gleb and said, ‘Please tell Mrs. Schweitzer to stop sending money because she is taking it to buy meat for the dogs and not food for herself.’ We never stopped. So she was aware of us as people who wanted to help.” After Anna Anderson returned to America in 1968 and became Anastasia Manahan, Marina Schweitzer continued, “we saw her two or three times a year. But it was more because of her closeness to my father than to us.”

  In fact, Marina Schweitzer was always somewhat wary of Anastasia Manahan. “She talked to us on the phone a lot … especially when she was having trouble with Jack. I purposefully kept her at a distance because she had a history of quarreling with every person who was close to her. And the truth is we never quarreled. She called me ‘Marina’ and she called Dick ‘Mr. Schweitzer.’ Another reason we did not go there often was that I could not stand the sight of Jack and the way he treated her as a prize possession, something to brag about. I think he did her case more harm than all her enemies put together. He used her to prop up his own ego. One thing that infuriated me was that, before he married her, he took my father and her to his bank and made her swear that she was Anastasia, and then made Father swear that he knew that she was Anastasia.”

  Whatever she did—and during her final years, the Schweitzers admit, she was often difficult—Marina and Richard Schweitzer never doubted that the woman they knew was the daughter of the tsar. Her behavior, they believed, was not abnormal for a woman who had been through the experiences she had endured. The crux was her identity “For us,” Richard Schweitzer said, “having known Anastasia all those years, it was a matter of family honor to try our utmost to fulfill her lifelong wish to have her identity as the Grand Duchess Anastasia recognized.”

  The Manahan family and James Blair Lovell did not realize, early in 1993, that they were not entitled by Virginia law to control of Anasta
sia Manahan’s tissue. In Virginia, in cases where there is no will and no surviving spouse or children, an estate devolves on next of kin by blood. John Manahan’s cousins were his wife’s next of kin, but not by blood, and when Martha Jefferson Hospital learned that the matter was being discussed, it politely informed the Manahans of this law. If the Manahans did not have control, then, by extension, they could not assign it to James Lovell, who, in turn, could not pass it to Mary DeWitt, or Thomas Kline, or anyone else.

  Informed of this by the hospital’s attorneys, Penny Jenkins began to worry She had already spoken to Richard Schweitzer when DeWitt had hired a Charlottesville lawyer to try to obtain the tissue. At that time Schweitzer had said, “Listen, if these people come to you and you don’t want to give them anything, tell me immediately. I will come to Charlottesville and file an intervenor in Marina’s name, insisting that nothing should be delivered unless the hospital is protected and part of the samples are kept.” Intervenor is a legal term describing a court-approved intervention by an outside party in an ongoing lawsuit. Because Marina was both a citizen of Virginia and a direct descendant of one of the victims of the Ipatiev House massacre, Schweitzer felt sure that she would be permitted to intervene.