After Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne in 1917, Russia quickly disintegrated into civil war. Negotiations for the release of the Romanovs between their Bolshevik (commonly referred to as 'Reds') captors and their extended family, many of whom were prominent members of the Royal Houses of Europe, stalled.^[43] As the Whites (loyalists still faithful to the Tsar and the principles of autocracy) advanced toward Yekaterinburg the Reds were in a precarious situation. The Reds knew Yekaterinburg would fall to the better manned and equipped White Army. When the Whites reached Yekaterinburg, the Imperial Family had simply disappeared. The most widely accepted account was that the family had been executed. This was due to an investigation by White Army Investigator Nicholas Sokolov, who came to the conclusion based on items that had belonged to the family being found thrown down a mine shaft at Ganina Yama.^[44]

The "Yurovsky Note", an account of the event filed by Yurovsky to his Bolshevik superiors following the execution, was found in 1989 and detailed in Edvard Radzinsky's 1992 book The Last Tsar. According to the note, on the night of the murders the family was awakened and told to dress. When they asked why, they were informed that they were being moved to a new location to ensure their safety in anticipation of the violence that might ensue when the White Army reached Yekaterinburg. Once dressed, the family and the small circle of servants and caregivers that had remained with them were herded into a small room in the house's sub-basement and told to wait. Alexandra and Alexei were allowed to sit in chairs provided by guards at the request of the Tsaritsa. After several minutes, the executioners entered the room, led by Yurovsky. With no hesitation, Yurovsky quickly informed the Tsar and his family that they were all to be executed. The Tsar had time to say only "What?" and turn to his family before he was assassinated with a bullet to the head. The Tsaritsa and her daughter Olga tried to make the sign of the cross, but were killed in the initial volley of bullets fired by the executioners, both suffering gunshot wounds to the head. The rest of the Imperial retinue was shot in short order with the exception of Anna Demidova, Alexandra's maid. Demidova survived the initial onslaught but was quickly murdered against the back wall of the basement, stabbed to death while trying to defend herself with a small pillow she had carried into the sub-basement that was filled with precious gems and jewels.^[45]

The "Yurovsky Note" further reported that once the thick smoke that had filled the room from so many weapons being fired in such close proximity cleared it was discovered that the executioners' bullets had ricocheted off the corsets of two or three of the Grand Duchesses. The executioners later came to find out that this was because the family's crown jewels and diamonds had been sewn inside the linings of the corsets to hide them from their captors. The corsets thus served as a form of "armor" against the bullets. Anastasia and Maria were said to have crouched up against a wall covering their heads in terror until they were shot down by bullets, recalled Yurovsky. However, another guard, Peter Ermakov, told his wife that Anastasia had been finished off with bayonets. As the bodies were carried out, one or several of the girls cried out and were clubbed on the back of the head, wrote Yurovsky.^[45]

[

Reports of survival

Anna Anderson, the most famous Anastasia claimant, would contend that she had feigned death amongst the bodies of her family members and servants, and that she was able to make her escape with the help of a compassionate guard who rescued her from amongst the corpses after noticing that she was still alive.^[46] She was one of at least ten women who claimed to be Anastasia. Some other lesser known claimants were Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilyeva^[47] and Eugenia Smith.^[48] Two young women claiming to be Anastasia and her sister Maria were taken in by a priest in the Ural Mountains in 1919 where they lived as nuns until their deaths in 1964. They were buried under the names Anastasia and Maria Nikolaevna.^[49]

Rumors of Anastasia's survival were further fueled by various contemporary reports of trains and houses being searched for 'Anastasia Romanov' by Bolshevik soldiers and secret police.^[50] When she was briefly imprisoned at Perm in 1918, Princess Helena Petrovna, the wife of Anastasia's distant cousin, Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia, reported that a guard brought a girl who called herself Anastasia Romanova to her cell and asked if the girl was the daughter of the Tsar. Helena Petrovna said she did not recognize the girl and the guard took her away.^[51] Although other witnesses in Perm later reported that they saw Anastasia, her mother Alexandra Fyodorovna and sisters in Perm after the murder, that story is now widely discredited as nothing more than a rumor.^[51] Another report is given more credibility by one historian. Eight witnesses reported the recapture of a young woman after an apparent escape attempt in September 1918 at a railway station at Siding 37, northwest of Perm. These witnesses were Maxim Grigoyev, Tatiana Sitnikova and her son Fyodor Sitnikov, Ivan Kuklin and Matrina Kuklina, Vassily Ryabov, Ustinya Varankina, and Dr. Pavel Utkin, a physician who treated the girl after the incident.^[52] Some of the witnesses identified the girl as Anastasia when they were shown photographs of the grand duchess by White Russian Army investigators. Utkin also told the White Russian Army investigators that the injured girl, whom he treated at Cheka headquarters in Perm, told him, "I am the daughter of the ruler, Anastasia." Utkin obtained a prescription from a pharmacy for a patient named "N" at the orders of the secret police. White Army investigators later independently located records for the prescription.^[53] During the same time period in mid-1918 there were several reports of young people in Russia passing themselves off as Romanov escapees. Boris Soloviev, the husband of Rasputin's daughter Maria, defrauded prominent Russian families by asking for money for a Romanov impostor to escape to China. Soloviev also found young women willing to masquerade as one of the grand duchesses for the benefit of the families he had defrauded.^[53]

However, according to some accounts there may have been an opportunity for one or more of the guards to rescue a survivor. Yakov Yurovsky demanded that the guards come to his office and turn over items they had stolen following the murder. There was reportedly a span of time when the bodies of the victims were left largely unattended in the truck, in the basement and in the corridor of the house. Some guards who had not participated in the murders and had been sympathetic to the grand duchesses were reportedly left in the basement with the bodies.^[54]

During a 1964–1967 German trial regarding the identity of Anna Anderson, Viennese tailor Heinrich Kleibenzetl testified that he saw a wounded Anastasia immediately following the murders at Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918. The girl was being treated by his landlady, Anna Baoudin, in a building directly opposite from the Ipatiev House.

"The lower part of her body was covered with blood, her eyes were shut and she was pale as a sheet," he testified. "We washed her chin, Frau Annouchka and me, then she groaned. The bones must have been broken ... Then she opened her eyes for a minute." Kleibenzetl testified that the wounded girl remained in his landlady's home for three days. During those days, Red Guards came to the house but knew his landlady too well to actually search the house. "They went like this: 'Anastasia's disappeared but she's not here, that's for sure,'" he testified. Finally a Red Guard, the same man who had brought her came to take her away. Kleibenzetl knew no more about her fate.^[55]

Kleibenzetl had delivered clothing to the Ipatiev House and seen the grand duchesses walking in the home's enclosed courtyard but had never spoken to any of them. He testified that the wounded girl was "one of the women" he had seen walking in the courtyard, not that he personally recognized her as Anastasia.^[55]

Thomas Hildebrand Preston, who was the British Consul-General in Ekaterinburg, at the time of the murders, refuted Kleinbenzetl's claims and stated: "As to the person Franz Svboda, who claims to have rescued the still living but wounded Grand Duchess Anastasia from the House Ipatiev and taken her to a nearby house in his friend's cart, Svboda's evidence is the most important of all the witnesses. The following are my observations on Svboda's evidence which to my mind does not hold water on any counts : In the first place why should an Austrian prisoner of war concern himself, with enormous risk to his own life, with the fate of the Emperor of a country with which his own country was at war? Secondly, Svboda produces a cock-and-bull story about a certain 'H' (whose name he won't disclose because the man is still alive in the U.S.S.R.) who, he alleges, was the Commandant of the Tcheka, who helped him to make contact with the Tsar with a view to his liberation. In a reign of terror such as prevailed in Ekaterinburg at one time and the violent and fanatical hatred of the Romanov dynasty by the Ekaterinburg Tcheka which consisted mainly of Jews, who had reason to hate the regime, treachery on the part of one of its members - e.g. 'H' - is unthinkable. Moreover, as British Consul, I was extremely well informed of what was going on and should almost certainly have heard of Svboda's alleged activities had they been true." ^[56]

There were also reports from Bulgaria of the survival of Anastasia and her younger brother Tsarevich Alexei. In 1953, Peter Zamiatkin, who was reportedly a member of the guard of the Russian Imperial Family, told a 16-year-old fellow hospital patient that he had taken Anastasia and Alexei to his birth village near Odessa at the request of the Tsar. After the assassination of the rest of the royal family, Zamiatkin reportedly escaped with the children via ship, sailing from Odessa to Alexandria. The alleged survivors, "Anastasia" and "Alexei," reportedly lived out their lives under assumed names in the Bulgarian town of Gabarevo near Kazanlak. The Bulgarian Anastasia claimant called herself Eleonora Albertovna Kruger and died in 1954.^[57]

Anastasia's possible survival was one of the celebrated mysteries of the 20th century. In 1922, as rumors spread that one of the grand duchesses or that all of the family had survived a woman who later came to call herself Anna Anderson appeared in Germany and claimed to be Anastasia. She created a life-long controversy and made headlines for decades with some surviving relatives believing she was Anastasia and others not. Indeed, it was she who made Anastasia and her legend famous. Her battle for recognition continues to be the longest running case that was ever heard by the German courts where the case was officially filed. It began in 1938, and a final verdict was not handed down until 1970. The final decision of the court was that Anderson had not provided sufficient proof to claim the identity of the grand duchess. In it, it also held that the death of Grand Duchess Anastasia had never been established as a historically proven fact.^[58]

Anderson died in 1984 and her body was cremated. DNA tests were conducted in 1994 on a tissue sample from Anderson located in a hospital and the blood of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a grand-nephew of Empress Alexandra. According to Dr. Gill who conducted the tests, "If you accept that these samples came from Anna Anderson, then Anna Anderson could not be related to Tsar Nicholas or Tsarina Alexandra." Anderson's mitochondrial DNA was a match with a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowka, a missing Polish factory worker.^[59]

Forensic experts conducted comparisons in 1994 of photographs of Grand Duchess Anastasia and pretender Anna Anderson's face and ears, following routine procedures of legal identification. The tests, commissioned for a British television documentary, indicated that that Anna Anderson's ears matched those of the Grand Duchess. However, supporters of Anderson acknowledged that the DNA tests proving she could not have been the Grand Duchess had "won the day." ^{[60] [61]}

[

Romanov grave

In 1991, bodies believed to be those of the Imperial Family and their servants were finally exhumed from a mass grave in the woods outside Yekaterinburg. The grave had been found nearly a decade earlier, but was kept hidden by its discoverers from the Communists who still ruled Russia when the grave was originally found. Once opened, the excavators realized that instead of eleven sets of remains (Tsar Nicholas II; Tsarina Alexandra; Tsarevitch Alexei; the four Grand Duchesses, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia; the family's doctor, Yevgeny Botkin; their valet, Alexei Trupp; their cook, Ivan Kharitonov; and Alexandra's maid, Anna Demidova) the grave held only nine. Alexei and, according to the late forensic expert Dr. William Maples, Anastasia's bodies were missing from the family's grave. Russian scientists contested this, however, claiming that it was the body of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia that was missing. The Russians identified Anastasia by using a computer program to compare photos of the youngest grand duchess with the skulls of the victims from the mass grave. They estimated the height and width of the skulls where pieces of bone were missing. American scientists found this method inexact.^[62]

American scientists thought the missing body to be Anastasia because none of the female skeletons showed the evidence of immaturity, such as an immature collarbone, undescended wisdom teeth, or immature vertebrae in the back, that they would have expected to find in a seventeen year old. In 1998, when the remains of the Imperial Family were finally interred, a body measuring approximately 5'7" was buried under the name of Anastasia. Photographs taken of her standing beside her three sisters up until six months before the murders demonstrate that Anastasia was several inches shorter than all of them. Her mother commented on sixteen-year-old Anastasia's short stature in a December 15, 1917 letter, written seven months before the murders. "Anastasia, to her despair, is now very fat, as Maria was, round and fat to the waist, with short legs. I do hope she will grow."^[63] Scientists considered it unlikely that the teenager could have grown so much in the last months of her life. Her actual height was approximately 5'2".^[64]

DNA testing confirmed these were the remains of the Imperial Family and their servants, although the fate of the two missing children remains a mystery. Some historians believe the account of the "Yurovsky Note" that two of the bodies were removed from the main grave and cremated at an undisclosed area. The rationale was that this action would create doubt that these were the remains of the Tsar and his retinue should the grave be discovered by the Whites because the body count would not be correct. However, some forensic experts believe the complete burning of two bodies in that short amount of time would have been impossible given the environment and materials possessed by Yurovsky and his men.^[65] Numerous searches of the area in subsequent years failed to turn up a cremation site or the remains of the two missing Romanov children.^[66]

However, on August 23, 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg that appeared to match the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs. The archaeologists said the bones are from a boy who was roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman who was roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three years old. Anastasia was seventeen years, one month old at the time of the assassination, while her sister Maria was nineteen years, one month old and her brother Alexei was two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. Anastasia's elder sisters Olga and Tatiana were twenty-two and twenty-one years old at the time of the assassination. Along with the remains of the two bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber." The bones were found using metal detectors and metal rods as probes.^[67]

Preliminary testing indicated a "high degree of probability" that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters, Russian forensic scientists announced on January 22, 2008. The testing began in late December 2007. On April 30, 2008, Russian forensic scientists announced that DNA testing proves that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters, though several news reports are referring to Maria as the missing sister. ^[68]

[

Sainthood

For more information, see Romanov sainthood

In 2000, Anastasia and her family were canonized as passion bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church. The family had previously been canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as holy martyrs. The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were finally interred at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, eighty years after they were murdered.^[69]

[

Influence on culture

The possible survival of Anastasia has been the subject of both theatrical and made-for-television films. The earliest, made in 1928, was called Clothes Make the Woman. The story followed a woman who turns up to play the part of a rescued Anastasia for a Hollywood film, and ends up being recognized by the Russian soldier who originally rescued her from her would-be assassins.

The most famous is probably the highly fictionalized 1956 Anastasia starring Ingrid Bergman as Anna Anderson, Yul Brynner as General Bounine (a fictional character based on several actual men), and Helen Hayes as the Dowager Empress Marie, Anastasia's paternal grandmother. The film tells the story of a woman from an asylum who appears in Paris in 1928 and is captured by several Russian émigrés who feed her information so that they can fool Anastasia's grandmother into thinking Anderson actually is her granddaughter in order to obtain a Tsarist fortune. As time goes by they begin to suspect that this "Madame A. Anderson" really is the missing Grand Duchess.

The story served as the basis for the short-lived 1965 musical Anya.

In 1986, NBC broadcast a mini-series loosely based on a book published in 1983 by Peter Kurth called Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson. The movie, Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna was a two-part series which began with the young Anastasia Nicholaievna and her family being sent to Yekaterinburg, where they are executed by Bolshevik soldiers. The story then moves to 1923, and while taking great liberties, fictitiously follows the claims of the woman known as Anna Anderson. Amy Irving portrays the adult Anna Anderson.

The most recent film is 1997's Anastasia, an animated musical adaptation of the story of Anna Anderson's fictional escape from Russia and her subsequent quest for recognition. The film took greater liberties with historical fact than the 1956 film of the same name.

In The Romanov Prophecy, a 2004 novel by Steve Berry, the wounded Anastasia and Alexei are rescued by guards and spirited away to the United States, where they live under assumed names with a family of loyalists paid by Felix Yussupov. In the novel, both children died of illnesses in the 1920s, but not before Alexei married and fathered a son.

[

Ancestry

[

References

• Bokhanov Alexander, Knodt Manfred, Oustimenko Vladimir, Peregudova Zinaida, Tyutynnik Lyubov (1993). The Romanovs: Love, Power, and Tragedy. Leppi Publications. ISBN 0-9521-6440-X
• Christopher Peter, Kurth Peter, Radzinsky Edvard (1995). Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra. Little Brown and Co. ISBN 0-3165-0787-3
• Dehn, Lili (1922). The Real Tsaritsa. alexanderpalace.org.
• Eagar, Margaret (1906). Six Years at the Russian Court. alexanderpalace.org.
• Gilliard, Pierre. Thirteen Years at the Russian Court alexanderpalace.org.
• King Greg, Wilson Penny (2003). The Fate of the Romanovs. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-20768-3
• Kurth, Peter (1983). Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson. Back Bay Books. ISBN 0-316-50717-2
• Lovell, James Blair (1991). Anastasia: The Lost Princess. Regnery Gateway. ISBN 0-89526-536-2
• Mager, Hugo (1998). Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia. Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc. ISBN 0-7867-0678-3
• Massie, Robert K. (1967). Nicholas and Alexandra. Dell Publishing Co. ISBN 0-4401-6358-7
• Massie, Robert K. (1995). The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. Random House. ISBN 394-58048-6
• Maylunas Andrei, Mironenko Sergei (eds), Galy, Darya (translator) (1997). A Lifelong Passion, Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-48673-1
• Occleshaw, Michael (1993). The Romanov Conspiracies: The Romanovs and the House of Windsor. Orion Publishing Group Ltd. ISBN 1-85592-518-4
• Radzinsky, Edvard (1992). The Last Tsar. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-42371-3
• Radzinsky, Edvard (2000). The Rasputin File. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-48909-9
• Sams, Ed. Victoria's Dark Secrets. curiouschapbooks.com.
• Shevchenko, Maxim. The Glorification of the Royal Family. Nezavisemaya Gazeta, May 31, 2000.
• Vorres, Ian (1965). The Last Grand Duchess. Scribner. ASIN B-0007-E0JK-0
• Vorres, Ian (1985). The Last Grand Duchess London, Finedawn Press (3rd edition)
• Vyrubova, Anna. Memories of the Russian Court. alexanderpalace.org.
• Zeepvat, Charlotte (2004). The Camera and the Tsars: A Romanov Family Album. Sutton Publishing. ISBN 0-7509-3049-7

[

Notes and sources

[

External links

• Anastasia's Art Studio
• The Murder of Russia's Imperial Family Nicolay Sokolov Investigation of the murder of the Romanov Imperial Family in 1918, in Russian.
• FrozenTears.org A media library of the last Imperial family
• Anastasia Information A web site dealing with the controversy surrounding Anastasia's death.
• Anastasia Nicholaievna Romanova Info on Anastasia. Pictures, letters, memoirs.
• Article by Peter Kurth — who claims to be Anna Anderson’s "biographer" defends his opinions about why he thinks "Anna Anderson" was Anastasia.
• The Glorification of the Royal Family
• Anastasia and Anna Anderson A website with an overview of Anastasia's life and legend and a brief discussion of Anna Anderson's tale along with links to various books on the subject.
• Hemophilia A (Factor VIII Deficiency)
• Could the Bulgarian mountain village of Gabarevo be the last refuge of the lost Romanov Princess?

v • d • e Grand Duchesses of Russia 1st Generation Anna Petrovna, Duchess of Holstein-Gottorp · Elizabeth I Petrovna · Natalia Petrovna · Margarita Petrovna · Natalia Petrovna · Anna I Ivanovna 2nd Generation Natalia Alexeievna 3rd Generation none 4th Generation Anna Petrovna 5th Generation Alexandra Pavlovna, Archduchess Joseph of Austria · Elena Pavlovna, Hereditary Princess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin · Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach · Catherine Pavlovna, Queen of Württemberg · Olga Pavlovna · Anna Pavlovna, Queen of the Netherlands 6th Generation Maria Alexandrovna · Elizabeth Alexandrovna · Maria Nicholaevna, Duchess of Leuchtenberg · Olga Nicholaevna, Queen of Württemberg. · Maria Mikhailovna · Elizabeth Mikhailovna, Duchess of Nassau · Elizabeth Nicholaevna · Catherine Mikhailovna, Duchess George Augustus of Mecklenburg-Strelitz · Anna Mikhailovna 7th Generation Alexandra Alexandrovna · Olga Constantinovna, Queen of Greece · Maria Alexandrovna, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha · Anastasia Mikhailovna, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin 8th Generation Xenia Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess Alexander of Russia · Olga Alexandrovna · Elena Vladimirovna, Princess Nicholas of Greece and Denmark · Maria Pavlovna 9th Generation Olga Nicholaevna · Tatiana Nicholaevna · Maria Nicholaevna · Anastasia Nicholaevna · Maria Kirillovna, Princess of Leiningen* · Kira Kirillovna, Princess of Prussia* 10th Generation Maria Vladimirovna* * title of pretence

Persondata
NAME	Russia, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia
DATE OF BIRTH	June 18, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH	Peterhof, Russia
DATE OF DEATH	July 17, 1918
PLACE OF DEATH	Ekaterinburg, Russia

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