The Resurrection of the Romanovs (22 page)

Even so, Gilliard remained in regular contact with Zahle, Rathlef-Keilmann, and members of the Russian émigré community in Berlin, probing the case. “I have not concealed from you, since my second visit to Berlin, that my investigation has only brought negative results, but out of duty I thought I should impartially and conscientiously continue to examine new facts as they appear, to give the patient every possible chance and to not overlook a single detail, however insignificant it might at first appear. Since my first visit to Berlin, all of the facts you have communicated from the patient were either matters of common knowledge—and thus not surprising that they were known to her—or if they were intimate in nature, without exception contained errors that Anastasia Nikolaievna would never have made.”
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What of Alexandra Gilliard? Frau Tchaikovsky’s supporters believed, as Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich asserted, that she “certainly did recognize Anastasia during the visits to the hospital.”
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But Andrei Vladimirovich had not been present during the encounters in Berlin, and his declaration rests on nothing more than the opinions of Rathlef-Keilmann and of Zahle; he never even spoke to Alexandra Gilliard about the issue. Still, people assumed the worst—that Alexandra Gilliard could not, as Peter Kurth wrote, “admit” to having recognized the claimant “because she was Mme. Pierre Gilliard.”
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Thus, the claimant’s supporters were convinced, Alexandra Gilliard was forever silenced by her husband. She was forced, they held, to conceal her true feelings; Gilliard, they believed, never allowed her to express a single opinion on the case. They were wrong.

For the former nurse, the wife of Pierre Gilliard, the woman whom Zahle declared had a heart “stronger than her head,” did indeed offer her opinion on Frau Tchaikovsky’s asserted identity.
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The encounters in Berlin—evoking, as they did, the ghosts of a painful past—were fraught with anxiety and emotion, something her husband fully admitted. But Alexandra Gilliard’s parting words, as recorded by Rathlef-Keilmann, her reference to the claimant not as Anastasia but rather as “this girl here,” suggest not recognition but rather the pity of which her husband later wrote. Three months after the meeting in Berlin, Madame Gilliard wrote frankly to Rathlef-Keilmann, “Though I have not found anything in her features or her ways that remind me of Anastasia Nikolaievna, I am ready to help you in your researches. . . . The letter of the invalid is touching and has moved me, but I have not found in it Anastasia.”
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This seems decisive enough, but there was more: in January 1927, Alexandra Gilliard signed her name to a formal statement rejecting the claimant as Anastasia. There was, she admitted, “a common malformation of the feet” shared by Frau Tchaikovsky and the grand duchess, and “a vague resemblance, more to Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaievna than to Anastasia Nikolaievna,” but “any similarity” to the youngest of Nicholas II’s daughters “vanished on prolonged physical inspection.” According to Alexandra Gilliard, Frau Tchaikovsky was not Anastasia.
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If evidence does not support the pervasive myth that the Gilliards recognized Frau Tchaikovsky as Anastasia, it is even less compelling in the case of Olga Alexandrovna. She may well, as Gilliard wrote, have been “deeply troubled” over Frau Tchaikovsky’s “strange revelations,” and confused over certain aspects of the case; after all, she had last seen a fifteen-year-old, pudgy Anastasia for an hour in 1916, and in Berlin faced an emaciated young woman in her twenties. But much of the supposed evidence of her recognition—the very evidence that helped transform the case into a modern myth—is at best questionable and often demonstrably wrong. Take, for example, the heartwarming conversation at the Mommsen Clinic that Rathlef-Keilmann noted in her statement, in which Olga had spoken of “Our Little One” and “Shura” being “happy to have found one another again.” Surely this was proof that she believed Frau Tchaikovsky to be Anastasia. And yet, if this took place, why did Rathlef-Keilmann omit such a critical and highly revealing piece of information from her book on the case? It is yet another conflict between what she claimed privately and what she published, another shifting of Rathlef-Keilmann’s stories. Perhaps she simply eliminated an exaggerated conversation from her book because, prior to publication, she asked Olga Alexandrovna to read the manuscript; according to Zahle, the grand duchess only examined those passages in which her visit was mentioned, and she had agreed that they were “correct” in their “depiction” of what had occurred.
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But coupled with other discrepancies in her accounts, contradictions from Zahle, from Gilliard, and from her own writings, it undermines Rathlef-Keilmann as a completely credible voice in the case.

It seems likely, especially given her parting words—whatever they may have been—to Zahle, that Olga Alexandrovna left Berlin troubled, perhaps still uncertain, but without having recognized Frau Tchaikovsky as Anastasia. She may, though, have harbored some uncertain hope, something hinted at in the letter she sent to Zahle on leaving Germany, a letter that had included such lines as “whoever she is” and “my feeling is that she is not the one she believes,” but that also ended with the ambiguous “one can’t
say she
is not as a fact.” From this it is apparent that Olga was unable or unwilling to immediately make a final decision, although she clearly doubted that the claimant was her niece. Just a few weeks later, she reiterated this position to John Prince, an envoy at the American embassy in Copenhagen, saying that neither she nor the Gilliards “could establish an identification,” though Prince noted that the grand duchess “did not absolutely deny this woman’s identity. . . . She is convinced that she is not consciously simulating, as she was given many opportunities to give false answers which she did not avail herself of, but neither could she give correct ones. Grand Duchess Olga left Berlin without being able to give any definite answer as to the identity of Frau Tchaikovsky, although she is almost sure that the claimant cannot be Anastasia.”
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But if this was true, why did Olga Alexandrovna send all of those letters to Frau Tchaikovsky, all of those intimate gifts, including a personal photograph album? These, the claimant’s supporters suggested, were proof that Olga had indeed recognized her as Anastasia and only later changed her mind, ignoring the fact that her own farewell letter to Zahle undermined any such contention. Later, Olga justified her actions, declaring, “I know I should never have done so, but I did it out of pity. You have no idea how wretched that woman looked.”
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While the grand duchess may have acted rashly in dispatching letters and gifts, she almost certainly did so, as she insisted, out of compassion rather than recognition. Indeed, in none of the letters did she address the claimant as “Anastasia,” indicate that she accepted any family relationship with her, nor sign herself as “Aunt Olga.” In writing to Frau Tchaikovsky in Russian, she employed the formal form of “you,” addressing her not as an intimate but as a stranger.
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These letters, though, may have served a hidden agenda. Olga Alexandrovna was awaiting word of Gilliard’s ongoing investigations into the more perplexing aspects of the case before making any public statement. There were, she frankly admitted, “many remarkable things” that the claimant seemed to know, and that needed to be resolved, but she asked Gilliard to continue his investigation in Berlin, seeking possible answers from the émigré circles in which Frau Tchaikovsky had moved.
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Until these questions could be answered, Olga may have hoped that the apparently friendly gestures would ensure the temporary silence of Tchaikovsky and her supporters, for there was constant worry that Rathlef-Keilmann was about to go public with her version of events.
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Zahle, for his part, reported in an official memorandum what seems to have been the truth of the affair, a truth that—despite his claims that Rathlef-Keilmann’s book was correct—contradicted the legend. Olga Alexandrovna, he explained, had been unable to give a definitive answer to the question of the claimant’s identity during the visit, but after receiving more information from Berlin and answers from Gilliard’s investigation, she was able to reject the possibility that the woman was her niece.
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And if this was true, what of all the stories of Olga’s private doubts, of her anguished indecision over the affair? Nearly all were based on second-, third-, or fourthhand information, and many were spread by Andrei Vladimirovich, who, despite receiving assurances from Olga that she had not recognized Frau Tchaikovsky as Anastasia, reported quite the opposite, seizing upon every rumor because he fully believed in the integrity of Rathlef-Keilmann and Zahle. Rendering the situation even more confusing, Andrei—after diligently circulating and repeating all rumors to the contrary—later insisted that he did not believe Olga Alexandrovna had ever been “entirely convinced” that the claimant was Anastasia.
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And whatever uncertainly Olga may have had evaporated over those autumn months of 1925. At the beginning of December, she wrote to Anatole Mordvinov, former adjutant to her brother Nicholas II, “All of us tried very hard to get her to reveal something new, but she merely spoke of happy trivialities. When we asked her about some aspect of the past, she would fall silent and cover her eyes with her hands. There’s no resemblance, and she is without doubt not Anastasia, but still it is a remarkable thing, and she is completely convinced that she is Anastasia. . . . I left deeply moved. . . . It’s a very sad tale, and I’m terribly sorry for this confused girl. . . . Mama isn’t interested at all and opposed my trip, but I had to go for the sake of the family.”
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And to Princess Irene of Prussia she wrote, “There is no resemblance at all. . . . She was unable to answer one of the many intimate questions asked. It was pitiful to see how the poor creature tried to convince us she was Anastasia. . . . Her head had been stuffed with all these stories, she has been shown a lot of photos, etc., and, one day, she astonished the world with her ’memories.’ Mr. Gilliard, his wife, my husband, and above all, old Volkov, all saw and spoke with her, and none believe she is our Anastasia. But it is said that we all recognized her and later had orders from Mama to say she is not Anastasia. This is a huge lie! I suspect blackmail, though many people, who never knew Anastasia, seem to believe it. During the four days we spent in Berlin, Mr. Gilliard and my husband saw all the Russians with whom she had lived formerly, and they thus learnt many things that are of great importance. . . . It is always possible to find explanations for this case, if one takes the time to do so.”
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Olga Alexandrovna never officially wavered from this position, and she repeated it in a series of letters over the next few years. “No matter how much we tried,” she wrote to Tatiana Botkin, “none of us were able to recognize either of my nieces Tatiana or Anastasia in this patient; in fact, we were convinced of the opposite.”
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Soon enough, though, Olga learned of the intimations, of the rumors, and of the outright declarations asserting that she had indeed recognized Frau Tchaikovsky and later rejected her. “Everyone,” she wrote, “is assailing me from all sides over this affair. Letters come from all over about her—it’s simply horrid! No one wants to believe that we didn’t recognize her, and we hear such unkind things being said. She herself is very nice, but those around her all lie.”
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And, a few months later, “I am so tired of this Berlin business! Letters and telegrams without end come from the world over—even California. People accuse us, out of self-interest, of not recognizing her. What an idiotic thing to believe! God be with them! But we’re not going to issue any more denials.”
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The idea that Olga Alexandrovna had recognized and then rejected Frau Tchaikovsky as her niece became central to the mythology of the case, but it haunted the grand duchess for the rest of her life. There was, it is true, a certain ambiguity in her statements and in her behavior that led many favorable to the claimant to suspect the worst; later there came tales that in her waning years Olga was again overwhelmed with doubt, that she had confided to a friend in Toronto that she had indeed recognized the claimant as Anastasia. Ultimately, according to this story, she had been forced to deny her owing to “family pressure.”
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Whether this was true or not, whether it reflected a momentary lapse or a more pervasive and lingering question, Olga despised any hint that she had in any way been uncertain, and like many others in the case she began to recast her history with the claimant, depicting the meeting at the Mommsen Clinic in increasingly adamant and contradictory statements designed to conceal any initial doubt.

In 1959, a reluctant Olga Alexandrovna gave a deposition to a visiting German judge in the court case the claimant had brought for legal recognition as Anastasia. In this encounter at the West German consulate in Toronto, Olga explained her letters and small gifts to Frau Tchaikovsky as “friendly acts toward a sick person,” not as indications of recognition.
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Then there was the issue of a cable Olga was said to have received from her sister Xenia during the Berlin visit, instructing her not to acknowledge the claimant as Anastasia. Though such a cable has never come to light, its existence was largely accepted as fact by the claimant’s supporters.
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“I swear to God,” Olga Alexandrovna said during her testimony at the consulate, “that I never received, either before or after my visit to Berlin, any telegram or letter from my sister Xenia advising me not to acknowledge the claimant. This is simply not true.”
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When asked about the October 31, 1925, letter to Zahle in which she had said, “one can’t
say she
is not” Anastasia “as a fact.” However, Olga began to obfuscate. At first, she denied that any such letter existed; when shown a copy, she insisted, not at all convincingly, that she had not written the message. When someone dared to point out her signature at the bottom of the letter, she finally snapped, saying, “If I wrote that letter, I cannot say today why I used these words, as it was certainly my opinion that the person was not Anastasia!”
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Clearly unwilling to admit that she had ever harbored even the most minimal of doubts, Olga Alexandrovna became increasingly agitated, her replies “curt and evasive” when they were given at all; finally, she became so hysterical that officials summoned a doctor, but she prematurely ended the evidentiary dilemma by declaring the deposition at an end and storming out of the consulate.
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