The Resurrection of the Romanovs (19 page)

Frau Tchaikovsky was a restless, lonely figure in these years, valued only for what the ambitious could envision winning from her claim and shuffled from one émigré to another like an unwelcome burden. Her health was deteriorating and forced her into extended stays at various Berlin hospitals. That she was truly ill no one could doubt: even by the spring of 1922, when she left Dalldorf, she was already suffering from the early effects of tuberculosis; serious infections came and went, along with bouts of anemia and persistent headaches. In the autumn of 1922 she was admitted to Berlin’s West End Hospital, a Catholic-run institution at Charlottenburg, under the name of Anastasia Tchaikovsky and treated for the tubercular infection on her chest.
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She came and went from the hospital over the next year as her health improved or worsened; by the summer of 1925 she was again a patient, this time at Berlin’s St. Mary’s Hospital.
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Anna Anderson in St. Mary’s Hospital, Berlin, 1925.

Fortunately, finally, a disparate trio had stepped in and begun to tend to Frau Tchaikovsky’s interests in an organized fashion. Serge Botkin, president of the Office of Russian Refugees in Berlin, was a cousin of Dr. Eugene Botkin, who had been murdered in Ekaterinburg with the Romanovs. Assisted by his deputy Baron Vassili Osten-Sacken, Botkin collected and distributed funds among the émigré community, organizing their feeble efforts at cohesion and offering a single channel through which the human flotsam of the Russian Empire could appeal for official papers and needed aid.
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Witnesses and depositions, claims and counterclaims all flowed through Botkin’s office in these years, making him one of the best-informed people in Berlin on the case. He was seemingly impartial in his conduct, and never publicly offered an opinion on her identity; privately, however, he was favorably disposed to her claim.
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Anna Anderson in a Berlin hospital, tended by Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann, 1925.

Herluf Zahle, the Danish minister to Berlin, was the second member of this triumvirate. A future temporary president of the League of Nations, Zahle began his involvement with the case innocently enough, exposed to the increasing rumors in the German capital; in time, however, he assumed a much larger role in the saga.
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Those involved with the claimant eventually came to view Zahle strictly in terms of black or white. For those who supported Tchaikovsky’s claim, he was a noble and honest diplomat, attempting to navigate a fine line between impartiality and his own eventual belief that she was Anastasia; those who opposed her claim, however, charged him with naive partiality, pointing out that he did all in his power to advance her case.
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The last of the trio arrived on the scene in June 1925. This was a middle-aged woman named Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann, who soon became Frau Tchaikovsky’s principal caretaker, most ardent supporter, dedicated chronicler, and the person who, more than any other, propelled her case into legend. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Riga—then a Russian province—Rathlef-Keilmann converted to Catholicism, married, had four children, and escaped to Germany after the Revolution, where—following her 1922 divorce—she established herself as an illustrator and sculptor of some repute. She was brought into the case by Dr. Karl Sonnenschein of St. Mary’s Hospital, who at the time was treating the claimant for a recurrence of tuberculosis.
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Opinions of Rathlef-Keilmann varied greatly, though no one doubted that she was absolutely dedicated to the claimant. Those who believed Tchaikovsky was Anastasia were convinced that Rathlef-Keilmann was absolutely honest, while opponents accused her, generously, of naïveté, and more often asserted that she deliberately distorted and suppressed information that undermined the claimant’s case. The latter, at least, was the opinion of former imperial tutor Pierre Gilliard, who at first believed Rathlef-Keilmann to be “an exalted person whose imprudent zeal threatened” her integrity.
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Even some of those who supported the claimant were at times troubled by what Zahle termed Rathlef-Keilmann’s “fixed ideas” and her “partiality” in investigating the supposed grand duchess and ignoring contrary evidence.
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By 1925, and after more than three years of intrigue over her claim, Frau Tchaikovsky remained very much an enigma. No one could quite agree, not only on her identity but also on her personality. Having observed her in the privacy of their Berlin apartment, both Nicholas von Schwabe and his wife, Alice, were less than impressed with the alleged grand duchess in whom they had first believed. Alice, in particular, was “persuaded that Frau Tchaikovsky was neither Russian, nor Orthodox.”
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Yet Dr. Ludwig Berg, who met her at St. Mary’s Hospital in Berlin, recorded that “in every circumstance she showed proof of altogether distinguished manners, and her conversation and her attitude were those of a person of good education.”
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These conflicting impressions underscored the claimant’s complex personality, her frequent changes of mood, her ability to appear completely charming one minute and storm into uncontrolled rages the next. Rathlef-Keilmann offered a knowing and not altogether flattering description of her character. Frau Tchaikovsky, she recorded, was “unable to understand actions that were genuinely intended for her welfare. Often she suspected those who were unselfishly working on her behalf.”
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The claimant “knew well how to sulk. She is sulky. In such periods of ill humor she even upbraided me, and asserted that I grudged her everything. With all her charm it is sometimes very difficult to get on with her, as she is irritable and oversensitive; for days at a time, she sulks and says nothing. She sulks and mopes, and displays with the utmost arrogance the consciousness of her social superiority. . . . Despite her sensitiveness, her mistrust, and her willfulness, she is a person of great charm, with whom it is impossible to be angry for long, and whom everyone who learns to know must love.”
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This says something of the claimant’s innate charm, that even those who suffered her fits of temper regarded her with loyalty.

Frau Tchaikovsky remained isolated in these years, confined to a succession of Berlin apartments and hospital wards, but her notoriety spread through Berlin and elsewhere in Germany and Europe. Even among members of Europe’s royal families it had become a subject of considerable allure and intrigue. Crowned uncles, aunts, and cousins took opposing views of this seemingly enigmatic case. Shortly after arriving on the scene, Rathlef-Heilmann dispatched a woman named Amy Smith to Darmstadt to plead the case with Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse. Smith carried a dossier of reports, affidavits, and photographs supporting the idea that Tchaikovsky was the grand duke’s niece. The grand duke, though, was less than impressed: his sister Irene had met with and rejected the claimant, and he had no reason to doubt her. Count Kuno von Hardenberg, the grand duke’s former marshal of the court, told Smith that “it was impossible that Anastasia or any member of the Imperial Family” could have survived the executions in Ekaterinburg.
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Privately, the grand duke suspected that the case was driven by Soviet agents “hoping to lay their hands” on any tsarist money in Europe.
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Yet others were more amenable to the idea that the claimant might just be Anastasia after all. Princess Martha of Sweden, who later married the future King Olav of Norway, came to Berlin in the 1920s and asked to meet Frau Tchaikovsky. When told how notoriously difficult the claimant could be over such encounters, she settled on viewing her from a distance. “That’s Anastasia!” the princess is said to have exclaimed, according to a later secondhand story, though how she could reach such a decision, especially given that she had last met Anastasia when the latter was still a child, is not known.
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One royal reaction without question came from former crown princess Cecilie, married to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s eldest son and herself the daughter of a Russian grand duchess. She, too, visited Frau Tchaikovsky in Berlin; though she had only a passing familiarity with Anastasia, she thought that the claimant bore some resemblance to members of the imperial family, particularly to Nicholas II and to his mother, Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. Her efforts at conversation failed. “She remained completely silent,” Cecilie recalled, “either from stubbornness or from confusion—which I could not decide.” The princess eventually left without forming a definite opinion.
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Nevertheless, she was interested enough to raise the issue with her sister-in-law Viktoria Luise, the kaiser’s only daughter; when Viktoria Luise, in turn, discussed the case with her mother-in-law, Thyra, duchess of Cumberland, things took a dramatic turn, for Thyra was a sister to Nicholas II’s mother.
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Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, in her last years in her native Copenhagen.

Recent events had not been kind to Marie Feodorovna. Long alienated from her daughter-in-law Empress Alexandra, the dowager empress had lost all three of her sons: George from tuberculosis in 1899, and Nicholas II and his brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, both victims of Bolshevik firing squads in 1918, while the presumed massacre in Ekaterinburg had taken the lives of five of her grandchildren. She had escaped Russia in 1919 with her daughter Xenia Alexandrovna (her other daughter, Olga Alexandrovna, fled the country separately), eventually settling in her native Denmark; here she lived outside Copenhagen in a villa called Hvidøre with Olga; Olga’s second, morganatic husband, Nicholas Kulikovsky; and their two sons. At the time, Nicholas II’s first cousin King Christian X sat upon the Danish throne; though his aunt Marie Feodorovna held fast to the idea that none of the imperial family had been killed, he listened to the stories of the claimant told by Thyra and by the dowager empress’s brother Prince Waldemar of Denmark, who was intrigued with the case. Apparently with the king’s blessing, Waldemar asked Herluf Zahle in Berlin to begin a private investigation into her case.
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Waldemar also asked Zahle to discreetly step in and pay the young woman’s expenses until the issue of her identity could firmly be settled.
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The Hessian royal family, relatives of Empress Alexandra, had taken an early interest in the case and at least made efforts to satisfy themselves about her asserted identity, but not a single Romanov had yet expressed any curiosity in the mysterious young woman. This finally changed when Zahle reported back to Copenhagen that the claimant might be Anastasia. Prince Waldemar apparently spoke with Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, and the latter agreed to send former courtier Alexei Volkov to Berlin to meet the young woman and report his findings.
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If she was a fraud, the issue was to be considered as settled; if, however, he was uncertain, the matter would be further investigated.
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Volkov, Empress Alexandra’s former groom of the chamber, had accompanied the Romanovs when, in 1917, they had been exiled to Siberia. He had spent nine months at Tobolsk with the prisoners, only to be arrested in Ekaterinburg and thrown into the city jail. After the execution, he and several other courtiers, transferred to Perm, were taken from their cells one September morning and led into a field; suspecting what was about to happen, Volkov ran for a nearby forest and managed to escape the bullets that killed his companions. After arriving in Europe, he had eventually gone to Copenhagen, where the dowager empress gave the elderly man a position in her household.