First published 2021
After Russian revolutionaries murdered the Tsar and his family in July 1918, rumours began to circulate that his youngest daughter had escaped. Hoaxes and legends about Anastasia persisted into the 1990s.
Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov was born on June 18 (June 5 according to the Russian calendar of the time), 1901, at Peterhof near St. Petersburg, Russia. Her sickly younger brother, Alexei, was born three years later. Anastasia and Alexei had three older sisters, Olga, Tatiana, and Maria. Short and plump, Anastasia had blue eyes and reddish blond hair. She was lively and mischievous, with a stubborn streak and a quick sense of humour. She learned foreign languages easily and was a talented mimic.
When World War I began in 1914, Anastasia and her sister Maria were too young to be hospital nurses like their mother and two older sisters. Instead, they regularly visited a hospital near Peterhof to cheer the wounded soldiers. The fortunes of the Romanov family deteriorated during the war, culminating in the Tsar’s abdication early in 1917 following a series of riots, and the family was placed under house arrest in the Alexander Palace.
In August 1917 the revolutionary provisional government sent the family by train to Siberia. They lived under guard in Tobolsk until April 1918, when soldiers transferred them to a house in Ekaterinburg. Just after midnight on the morning of July 17, 1918, the family, their doctor, three servants, and Anastasia’s dog, Jemmy, were taken to the basement and shot. The killers announced that the Tsar was dead but that the rest of the family had been taken somewhere safe. One report said that the empress and the children had gone to America. Not until 1926 did the Russian government admit to having executed the entire family. Rumours persisted that one or more of the Tsar’s children had escaped, and several women claimed to be Anastasia.
The most famous claimant emerged after German police rescued a young woman who tried to drown herself in Berlin, Germany, in 1920. She carried no identification and had apparently lost her memory. While hospitalised she began to say she was Anastasia, whom she resembled enough to confuse some who had known the grand duchess. A Berlin newspaper identified her in 1927 as a brain-damaged Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska. Franziska’s brothers and sisters said they were not certain the woman was their sister. The woman later moved to the United States under the name Anna Anderson; after her marriage to an American she was called Anastasia Manahan. A French play in the mid-1950s and a Hollywood film starring Ingrid Bergman in 1956 drew popular attention to Anna’s claim to be the lost grand duchess, which no one could prove or disprove. Her story found believers in such reputable biographers as Peter Kurth (‘Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson’, 1983) and James Blair Lovell (‘Anastasia: The Lost Princess’, 1991). After Anna Anderson’s death in 1984, Kurth’s book was the basis for the 1986 film ‘Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna’. An animated movie made in 1997 drew loosely on Anna Anderson’s story.
In Russia the search for the Romanov remains continued and in July 1991 the bones of nine human corpses and a dog were found in a mine pit outside Ekaterinburg. The bones were subjected to DNA tests, which identified them as the Tsar’s family and associates. Young Alexei and one of his sisters were missing, possibly having been burned shortly after they were killed. Experts disagreed on whether the missing girl was Anastasia or Maria. Further DNA tests in 1994 confirmed that Anna Anderson had been related to the Schanzkowski family and not to the Romanovs. Another claimant, Eugenia Smith, still alive in 1995, declined offers to have her blood tested for comparison with surviving Romanovs.
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