Queen Victoria's Gene

by D M Potts

  One of Edvard Radzinsky’s informants was a man who had known both Ermakov and Lyukhanov’s son. He believed Anastasia and the tsarevitch both survived and were taken off the lorry when it stopped on the way to the first burial site. Intriguingly, two eyewitnesses uncovered by Radzinsky observed that the bodies of two of the Ekaterinburg victims were missing from the lorry that took the corpses to the burial site. Did Lyukhanov, who had been party to the escape, tell his wife, who in her zeal for Communism then left him? Ermakov and Yurovsky covered up for each other. Fourteen-year-old Alexei had probably also worn a diamond corset but it was not described by the regicides because they never undressed him. When rumours of Anastasia’s survival reached Russia, Yurovsky changed the record of the names of those he cremated from Alexei and the lady-in-waiting to Alexei and Anastasia.

  More recently (June 1992), nine skeletons have been recovered from a shallow grave near Ekaterinburg. The skulls of the tsar and tsarina and three of their daughters, Olga, Tatiana and Anastasia, have been identified by comparison of their reconstructed faces with the computerized reconstructions of their heads from photographs,5 and a third skeleton has been identified from its lack of teeth as that of their personal physician, Dr Botkin. Three skeletons were originally identified as those of Olga, Marie and Tatiana,6 adding to the confusion. As one of the skulls is badly damaged the reliability of these identifications cannot be guaranteed. The bones were brought to England for mitochondrial DNA ‘finger-printing’. Mitochondria, small subcellular organelles found in most cells, are inherited only through the mother. All the tsarina’s children should therefore possess Queen Victoria’s mitochondria. Prince Philip should possess the same mitochondria as he is also descended in the female line from Victoria, and has been used for confirmation. The identity of the remaining three skeletons remains uncertain. One was female and two male, but the tsarevitch is not among them.

  The DNA tests were carried out at the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory at Aldermaston, Berks, England; preliminary results were published in July 1993 and a full report in 1994.7 The tests confirmed that the supposed skeletons of the tsarina and three of her daughters were indeed descendants of Queen Victoria as their chromosomal DNA matched those of Prince Philip, but the results also confirmed that the skeletons of the tsarevitch and another of the daughters were not buried in the mass grave. The bones of the tsar contained two kinds of mitochondrial DNA, a rare condition known as heteroplasmy. One kind exactly matched that from two distant relatives both descended in the female line from one of his maternal ancestors. The other kind differed at one point, due to a mutation which had occurred in the tsar himself or his immediate maternal ancestors.

  The new DNA evidence obviously disproves Sokolov’s account but also shows that both Yurovsky, who was in charge of the execution and accompanied the bodies to the grave, and Ermakov, who was in charge of the burials, lied. Ermakov claimed that all the corpses were destroyed; Yurovsky that those of the tsarevitch and a lady-in-waiting were destroyed. Although it is remotely possible that Yurovsky confused a mature lady-in-waiting with a daughter it seems more likely that they were both trying to conceal the embarrassing absence of two important bodies. This is also consistent with Radzinsky’s two eyewitnesses who insisted that two of the bodies were never put on the lorry before it left Ekaterinburg.

  The grave site appears to have been identified from Yurovsky’s description and to have been opened on two occasions prior to 1992, each time somewhat carelessly. In 1979 three geologists and a writer opened the grave and took out the three skulls, one of which had a gold dental bridge and was assumed to be the tsar’s. They took plaster casts and replaced them. Ten years later, it was rumoured that authorities from Moscow were going to excavate the site, so the three local men, with the backing of the local police, who kept guard, opened the grave again and this time removed nine skeletons, some rope, possibly used to haul the bodies out of the mine shaft, and fragments of glass vessels which may have contained the acid.

  It is beyond doubt that eleven people entered the execution chamber in the Ipatiev house. Yurovsky claimed that the bodies of Alexei and the lady-in-waiting were burnt but it is difficult to destroy a body totally and this tale might have been an effort to cover up the discrepancy between the eleven in the cellar and the nine buried bodies. Radzinsky does not identify his informant although he reproduces a drawing and two photographs: was he himself involved as one of the grave robbers? Did his informant really keep his identity secret?

  Evidence of a different story, but involving the sighting of Anastasia in European Russia, after the execution at Ekaterinburg, is contained in Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold’s 1976 book, The File on the Tsar. They tracked down Sokolov’s original seven-volume dossier on the murder, as well as the files of Nikander Mirolyubov, the public prosecutor of the Ekaterinburg district. These original documents differ surprisingly from Sokolov’s published report. Sokolov’s paper contains evidence that the tsarina and her four daughters were evacuated west to Perm, where they were kept as pawns in negotiations over the fate of the German Communists, particularly Karl Liebknecht, then held by the Germans. Summers and Mangold argue that the royal survivors were probably executed after Germany collapsed in 1918, when they ceased to be of value to the Russian Communists.

  At first sight it all sounds like a badly written detective mystery but there are interesting clues. It appears Sokolov made up his mind early in the inquiry that all the members of the family had been slaughtered at Ekaterinburg, even though he later accumulated a great deal of evidence that the women were evacuated to Perm. After the White Russians recaptured Perm Sokolov’s agents visited the town and interrogated a number of witnesses. His belief that the tsarina and the three elder daughters survived is clearly wrong, but it may be significant that most of his evidence relates to sightings of Anastasia, and that this evidence is earlier than her ‘reappearance’ in Germany. Sokolov recorded that in February 1919 a Jewish doctor, Pavel Ivanovich Utkin, made a long statement to White Russian investigators. He described how, on 20 September 1918, he had been called by a group of Bolsheviks in Perm to care for a young woman ‘somewhat average in height, very well educated, in appearance about eighteen or nineteen years old . . . her hair was cropped and did not reach her shoulders’. She was sick ‘and had been beaten’, and had a series of superficial face wounds. He cared for her wounds and visited her on three occasions, once staying for an hour. When Dr Utkin asked her who she was she replied, ‘In a trembling voice but quite distinctly . . . “I am the Ruler’s daughter, Anastasia’’.’

  Summers and Mangold give a number of reasons why Dr Utkin’s evidence is credible. He was a careful, almost pedantic, witness and at the end of his statement he said, ‘I request you alter my testimony in one respect. Anastasia Nikolyeva did not say to me exactly what you have written: “I am the daughter of the emperor [imperatora], Anastasia”, but the following: “I am the daughter of the ruler [gosudarya], Anastasia’’.’ Not knowing what name to write on the prescription for a medicine Utkin had simply put the letter ‘N’. The prescription was traced and verified. Utkin’s story is internally consistent and, as he pointed out, ‘I did not have the slightest doubt that she was the daughter of the emperor, then or now. What would be the purpose, you see, of a person hastening their own end, calling themselves by their true name when someone comes upon them by chance?’ The White Russians thought Utkin’s evidence so important they sent him to see Sokolov who entered the data in his files but never mentioned it in his book. To add to the confusion further batches of Sokolov’s papers have been auctioned more recently but have not yet been published.

  Moreover, Utkin was not the only witness who saw the princesses alive in Perm or to testify to an escape attempt by one of the daughters. Eighteen individuals claimed to have known about an episode where a daughter of the tsar was captured after an escape attempt. Maxim Grigoryev, a railway signalman, reported how he ran over to see ‘A young girl, who looke
d about 18 or 19’ sitting in a sentry box ‘looking very miserable’. He commented on her short cropped hair, as had Utkin, and lengths of shorn hair belonging to the royal children had been found in Ekaterinburg. Their hair had been cropped during their attack of measles. Another independent witness was the Count Carl Bonde, the Swedish representative of the Red Cross in Russia who was travelling on the Trans-Siberian railway in 1918. ‘At some place, the name of which has escaped my memory,’ he wrote later, ‘the train was stopped in order to find the Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. The Grand Duchess was, however, not aboard the train. Nobody knew where she had gone.’

  In the years following the death of the Russian royal family several pretenders appeared. The best known and most convincing was ‘Anastasia’: she did not press her claim but was first identified as Anastasia by others. The written record begins when she was rescued from the Landwehr canal in Berlin in 1920, following an apparent attempt at suicide. She carried no papers, spoke German ‘with a completely foreign accent’ and refused to give any account of herself. She resisted physical examination but doctors found her body covered with ‘many lacerations’. She weighed 110 lb, was incubating tuberculosis, her teeth needed to be pulled, she had a scar on her right temple, a wound on her foot, hammer toes and her middle fingers of both hands were very nearly the same length as her ring and index fingers.8 She was not a virgin and responded violently to questions about a possible fiancé, screaming in fractured German, ‘None of that!’

  After weeks of earnest but fruitless investigations the German police had still failed to identify their patient. She was labelled Fraulein Unbekannt [Miss Unknown] and transferred to a lunatic asylum. She was withdrawn, haughty and occasionally talked to the nurses in Russian. She was labelled a working woman but talked of riding horses. She was never diagnosed as having a recognizable psychotic illness and her refusal to explain herself was noted by her doctors as ‘more fear than reticence’.

  After two years of institutional life at Dalldorf, not far from Berlin, she began to confide in others. Her identity was suspected, although initially she was mistaken for Tatiana. She still responded to formal inquiries with terror, hiding her face and turning to the wall. Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, a former lady-in-waiting, was brought to see her. Miss Unbekannt had to be literally dragged from her bed in order that she could be seen, but Buxhoeveden dismissed her as ‘too short for Tatiana’. Fraulein Unbekannt said nothing to correct her, but when later identified as Anastasia she ever after accepted the diagnosis.

  She was seriously disturbed. Her statements were disjointed and often contradictory and by selection or omission could be made to support almost any tale. However, she bore a striking resemblance to photographs of the real Anastasia. The Grand Duchess Olga, an aunt of the real Anastasia, after several meetings, rejected her as an impostor. So did Pierre Gilliard, her former tutor. On the other hand, Madame Botkin, the daughter of the tsar’s doctor and one of the last people to see Anastasia alive, accepted her without question, as did her cousin Grand Duke Andrei and second cousin Princess Xenia Georgievna. She offended the Grand Duke of Hesse, her supposed uncle, by claiming to have seen him in St Petersburg in 1916, an odd but telling claim as there is independent evidence that the kaiser attempted to negotiate a separate peace with Russia at this time, sending the grand duke, the tsar’s brother-in-law, as his secret emissary. This claim was examined in detail at the German Court of Appeal in the 1960s. A corroborative witness was produced but efforts were made to discredit him and the Court finally left the matter open. Now that the tsar’s diaries are available it should be possible at last either to confirm the story or lay it to rest. If confirmed it would leave another enigma.9 To discredit the claimant the duke employed a private detective, Martin Knopf, who identified Miss Unbekannt as Franziska Schanzkowska, a Pomeranian munitions worker who had been severely injured in an explosion. Declared incurably insane she had been incarcerated in various hospitals but had escaped shortly before Miss Unbekannt had been rescued from her canal.

  In the 1920s there were half a million Russian monarchists in the country and they had made Berlin their headquarters. In exile they were an ill-tempered, fratricidal, leaderless group. The tsar’s immediate relatives fell into fanatically opposed camps and the rest of the exiles took sides around them, some supporting and others dismissing the claimant. Many of those who could have identified ‘Anastasia’ were dead and the survivors stood to lose their share of any Romanov fortune deposited in the west, if her claim were true. A number of investigations and legal cases ensued, partly driven by her claim that the tsar had transferred some huge fortune to a bank in England. It was almost certainly a false rumour: the only real wealth of the tsars that did survive after 1917 lay in the jewels relatives smuggled out of the country.10

  Most of the Russian royal exiles were penniless, except for the dowager tsarina who had smuggled a cache of jewels back to her Danish homeland, where she lived in a fantasy world convinced that her son and all his family had somehow escaped and were living in secret exile. When she died in 1928 the jewels were sent to England where many ended in Queen Mary’s possession while the dowager’s daughters, the Grand Duchesses Xenia and Olga, received only a small part of their true worth several years later. In 1930 Xenia and Olga, together with the Duke of Hesse and the tsarina’s sisters Irene and Victoria, persuaded the German courts to rule that the tsar and all his family had died at Ekaterinburg, thus excluding ‘Anna Anderson’ from any claim on any other inheritance. Friends of Anna petitioned in 1938 against the decision, leading to a case which lasted intermittently until 1968 when the courts reached the equivocal decision that while ‘Anastasia cannot be conclusively identified . . . the death of Grand Duchess Anastasia cannot be accepted as a conclusively historical fact!’

  She was shipped from hospital to castle and from palace to hotel. She continued to be exceedingly paranoiac and ever afraid of kidnapping. Eventually she came to the USA, where for a while she lived with Princess Xenia, a surviving cousin of the tsar. Once, while trying to escape prying journalists, she signed herself into an hotel as Anna Anderson. It was a name that stuck. On 23 December 1968, just as her immigrant status in the USA was being questioned, Anna Anderson was married to Dr John Manahan. The Most Revd Gleb Botkin, the son of the tsar’s physician who was murdered at Ekaterinburg, was best man. Asked what Tsar Nicolas might have thought of his new son-in-law, he said, ‘I think he would be grateful’. Manahan had spent a year at Harvard and then joined the wartime navy before becoming Associate Professor of History at Radford College in Virginia. ‘Jack’ and Anastasia made a benignly eccentric pair; he with his crumbling library and encyclopaedic knowledge of the genealogies of European aristocrats and she feeding her numerous pet cats and wearing clothes that were consistently too big for her.

  As we began working on this book it occurred to us that if we could obtain a sample of Mrs Manahan’s blood, it could be tested to see if she were a carrier of Victoria’s gene; a daughter of the tsarina would have had a 50 per cent chance of inheriting it. If she were a carrier, it would substantiate her story beyond all doubt; if she did not carry the gene – which was the other 50 per cent chance – then her case would not be affected. The test is a highly specialized one but we were in contact with Dr John Graham of the University of North Carolina and an internationally recognized specialist in haemophilia. Only one syringe full of fresh blood, or about 10 ml, was needed for an accurate measurement of Factor VIII. The plasma of carriers contains only half the normal concentration.

  We understood that Mrs Manahan had become so confused and eccentric in her old age that she might not understand what was being asked of her. We decided to approach Dr Manahan in a respectful and informed way through a medical colleague of Dr Graham who attended the same church in Charlottesville as Jack Manahan and who was also a geneticist. He explained the significance of the test to Dr Manahan who understood and agreed to what was being offered. Unfortunate
ly, at this time, towards the end of 1983, Mrs Manahan was admitted to hospital with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It is a rare disease, especially for an old person and in the middle of winter. Being in hospital should have made the task of getting a sample of blood a lot easier. Unfortunately, Dr Manahan decided to take her out of the hospital one November day, even though she had not totally recovered from the disease. Eventually, the Virginian police found the couple who claimed to be the daughter and son-in-law of the last Tsar of Russia, on a snowy road bundled up in an ancient station wagon. Mrs Manahan was taken back to hospital and placed in the legal care of a Charlottesville attorney. The attorney was approached in the same way as Dr Manahan had been and on several different occasions, but he adopted a wooden and antagonistic attitude, seemingly unable to grasp what was required.

  One of us read The Times obituary of Anastasia while on a bus in Italy. Immediately Dr Graham was contacted but the body had been cremated. In one final, improbable twist to a story which had been on the edge of solution so many times, we heard in 1992 that all patients with Rocky Mountain spotted fever had had blood samples taken and stored as part of a research project, but staff at the Centre for Disease Control were unable to find the specimen. Anyhow, a post-mortem specimen of blood might not have served the purpose.

  Some time after his wife’s death, we visited Dr Manahan. He remembered the request for the specimen of blood well and confirmed he had given his consent. He was still convinced the enemies of the tsar were after him and told us that only the previous week his library had been broken into by the British Secret Police and a glass case full of ancient flint arrowheads had been stolen. The whole of the bottom floor of the house was filled with his books and a further glacial mound of volumes slipped down off the outside porch. Remarkably, he still knew the ten thousand or more books well and searched for a long time until he found a passage he wanted to quote to us. As we climbed round between the bulging shelves we found we were ankle-deep in Indian arrowheads – it was not the British MI5 that had purloined the arrowheads but damp that had burst the case.