The Resurrection of the Romanovs (4 page)

And unlike other pretenders who came and went, appearing in a burst of publicity, only to be unmasked as clumsy frauds, Anderson seemed to be a genuine enigma. Far from receding into obscurity, she became celebrated, the sheer persistence and duration of her claim lending it a special aura of plausibility. From the autumn of 1921, when she first declared that she was Anastasia, until her death in 1984 and beyond, Anderson’s tale refused to die, a modern fairy tale enacted in grim hospital wards and private asylums, sprawling estates and ancient castles, across Germany and in America. Her legal battle to prove that she was the grand duchess spanned more than thirty years—the longest trial in German history—and stretched to include hundreds of witnesses and thousands of pages of testimony. Even Romanovs, European royalty, and former courtiers recognized her as Anastasia—an impressive array of supporters if she was merely an obvious fraud.

An obvious fraud she certainly wasn’t, nearly everything seemed to declare. It was what made her claim so intriguingly possible: Anderson was the same height as the diminutive Anastasia and, like her, suffered from a foot condition called
hallux valgus
; then there were her eyes—“unforgettable blue-gray eyes,” recorded one of her supporters, that reminded so many of Nicholas II.
5
When pulled from a Berlin canal in 1920, runs the history of her claim, Anderson’s body was covered with “many lacerations” and numerous scars, including a triangular-shaped wound through her right foot, a wound said to match exactly the shape of the bayonet blades used by the Bolsheviks during Russia’s Civil War—mute evidence, her supporters insisted, that she had been severely wounded during the Ekaterinburg massacre.
6
What impostor could be so lucky?

Or take languages, convincing, compelling evidence that Anderson was Anastasia, as the legend noted. She most often refused to speak Russian, though clearly she understood the language; yet she spoke it in her sleep “with good pronunciation,” said a doctor, and her voice carried a “typical Russian accent.”
7
Princess Xenia Georgievna, Anastasia’s cousin and a woman who believed that Anderson was the grand duchess, was said to have called it “perfectly acceptable Russian, from the point of view of St. Petersburg society.”
8
Under anesthesia, ran the stories, she “raved in English” and possessed what one lady described as “the clearest and best English accent.”
9
And, recorded one journalist, “Her French pronunciation was perfect.”
10
If she was an impostor, Anderson’s supporters pointed out, she must have been a very skillful and carefully prepared impostor to manage such a linguistic feat.

How could an impostor amass the wealth of intimate details about Anastasia’s life? people argued. Would an impostor know enough trivial details, as Anderson did, about former wounded officers who had convalesced in Anastasia’s hospital at Tsarskoye Selo to not only answer questions, and answer them accurately, but also to correct deliberate inaccuracies and—impressively—to recall a nickname the grand duchess had once bestowed on an obscure colonel?
11
Would an impostor break into tears of recognition, as Anderson was said to have done, upon hearing an obscure waltz that had been played for the grand duchesses?
12
Or know the intricacies of imperial etiquette so well that she never made a mistake in behavior, never a lapse in manner? Or convince anthropological experts that she was Anastasia? Or handwriting experts? And on and on it went—this string of unlikely coincidences, if they could be called that, that peppered the history of Anderson’s claim, that raised her from simple impostor to possible, plausible, even likely, said some, grand duchess.

This catalog of evidence reaches a kind of crescendo with the October 1925 encounter between Anderson and Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Anastasia’s favorite aunt. After three days, Olga left Berlin, left, said one of the claimant’s supporters, with words impossible to ignore: “My intelligence will not allow me to accept her as Anastasia, but my heart tells me that it is she. And since I have grown up in a religion that taught me to follow the dictates of the heart rather than those of the mind, I am unable to leave this unfortunate child.”
13
And she followed this with letters—“You are not alone now, and we shall not abandon you,” promised one.
14

Wasn’t this all convincing, compelling proof? The story of Anna Anderson’s claim, the mythology that enshrouded her case, that gave birth to endless books and movies, seemed so heavily weighted in her favor, so clear, that it was nearly impossible to accept the denunciations of Romanov relatives and former courtiers who rejected the idea that she was Anastasia. In the 1960s, in the midst of her legal battle, Anderson’s lawyers successfully appealed an earlier verdict by pointing out the double standard imposed by a German judicial tribunal in their ruling: the evidence of those who rejected Anderson or asserted the death of Anastasia in 1918 was received without objection, while those supporting her or questioning the Ekaterinburg massacre were subjected to rigorous examination. Outside of the court, though, it was just the opposite: so alluring was the myth, so pervasive the sympathetic renderings of her case, that—for much of the world—Anderson’s opponents had to justify themselves before history, to explain again and again, and often not very convincingly, why they believed she could not be Anastasia. This is how her case came to the public, how it played out in twentieth-century media. And this is how the public preferred it: people were more interested in the possibility that Anderson was Anastasia than in hearing tedious arguments challenging such a popular piece of modern lore.

One might ask, Why another book on Anna Anderson? What more could be said? An enormous record documents her case; the problem is that very little of it has ever come before the public. What has appeared, unfortunately, has been incomplete, often selectively edited to support the myth—if presented at all. This much we found as we embarked on this study, a study that began many years ago from personal interest and that eventually took us past the magazines and books and into boxes of files and legal records crammed with previously unknown and untapped detail. And in these documents we found something extraordinary: decades of distortion, manipulation, and outright lies, a series of deliberate deceptions and innocent errors churned up, added to, and endlessly repeated in the history of this case. This isn’t meant as a blanket indictment of those who have chronicled Anderson’s story; many have simply accepted without question the integrity of the original written record—a record compiled and composed, published and promoted by those most sympathetic to her claim, those who truly believed that she was Anastasia. Unfortunately for history—and for the history of this case—much of what the public has been led to believe is simply wrong.

The real story of Anna Anderson’s claim has never been told. It was a story we wanted to tell, but one that first we had to understand—understand what the evidence was, how her case grew into legend, how people came to believe and why they
needed
to believe, and ultimately who she was. And we eventually found the answers to these questions, and to a hundred others that have plagued her case for decades, that linger today as troubling contradictions and seemingly impressive rebuttals to her opponents. The answers were surprising, sometimes shocking, and made us reconsider nearly everything we thought we knew, nearly everything we—and history—had been led to believe was true in this case. Readers familiar with the tale may view this evidence skeptically, but they should be aware that we’ve been able to document the validity of what, until now, have always—at least in the usual accounting of Anderson’s story—been considered unreliable or questionable sources: a 1927 investigation into her identity, funded by Anastasia’s uncle Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig and carried out in the pages of a Berlin newspaper based on the word of a witness who’d been paid for her testimony, turned out to be far more convincing and surprisingly accurate than usually assumed, while former imperial tutor Pierre Gilliard, a man widely vilified as a pathological liar, proved—with one notable exception—to be one of the more reliable voices in the saga. Such discoveries meant not just a reassessment of the case, but also a new examination, starting from scratch, in an attempt to correct the historical record and inch ever closer to the devastating truth.

That truth was easier to find—“easier” being a relative word here—by returning to the original statements, depositions, affidavits, diary entries, letters, and reports that were woven together over the decades to create this most complex of modern myths. It meant wading through thousands of pages, in Russian, German, French, and English—a formidable task that consumed a decade of patient discovery, confusing assertions, and hopeless blind alleys. In the summer of 2000, we spent several weeks in London, working closely with Ian Lilburn, the acknowledged expert on Anderson’s case and the only man who attended every session of her German legal appeal in the 1960s. We rented a flat adjacent to his house and, thanks to British royal author Sue Woolmans, stocked it with a copying machine and stacks of paper; day by day, Ian shared both his memories and his vast collection, generosity that made our task much easier. Back in America, Anderson’s biographer Peter Kurth added numerous boxes of materials from his own archives to our growing collection, but the real coup came from an unexpected source: the Staatsarchiv in Darmstadt. The Hessian Royal Family, including Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig, had vehemently opposed Anderson’s claim; after the grand duke’s death, his son Prince Ludwig had voluntarily signed on as a codefendant when she brought suit in Germany for legal recognition, in a trial resulting in dozens of bound volumes of testimony. Assembled over the decades, the Darmstadt collection is an extraordinary cache of letters, reports, statements, depositions, medical opinions, and important testimonies, and we were the first historians granted access to this unique archive. In a case noted for decades of widespread publicity and international attention, it was an astonishing, embarrassingly deep well of riches upon which to draw, a historian’s dream, and one that allowed us to investigate the story in ways that constantly challenged our own opinions and the accepted mythology of the claim.

We have done our best to address some of the more perplexing questions in Anderson’s case, but fully admit that—as with most of history—certain aspects of her claim are probably destined to forever remain lost; when she died in 1984, she took many secrets to the grave. In some instances, we found the answers we were seeking; in others, those explanations remain obscure, or are so buried in the impenetrable layers of conflicting assertions that no one can now possibly resolve them. We’ve been careful to document everything and never accept a single opinion as fact unless it can be bolstered by other evidence, and have tried to keep theories to a minimum. But we’ve learned along the way that much of what we—and presumably many readers—took to be fact in Anderson’s story rested on erroneous and unreliable information. This book may shake preconceptions about her case, but it does so based on a written record that’s remained hidden far too long.

In the end, this is the story of a myth, of how a modern legend developed, of how people wanted to believe that Anderson was Anastasia, and of how fate and coincidence came together in one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary figures. No matter history’s verdict on Anna Anderson and the question of her identity, one thing is apparent: she was an exceptional woman, a woman with exceptional talents and an exceptional charm that enveloped her in an aura of believability that the world could not ignore. When she stepped off a Berlin bridge in 1920 and into the pages of history, she laid the foundation for a modern fairy tale so bewitching that she spawned magazine and newspaper articles, books, movies, cartoons, dolls—mute testament to the tantalizing power of her enigmatic story. This is the woman who haunts the pages that follow, and who continues to haunt history, a specter from a world long vanished, who in death—as in life—arouses violent passions and whose place in the story of Nicholas and Alexandra cannot be denied.

PART ONE

ANASTASIA

1

“My God, What a Disappointment!”

It was at the height of St. Petersburg’s famous White Nights, when the sun barely disappeared for a few hours from Russia’s capital, that the artillery thunder began. Night had come and gone in less than a few hours, leaving the sky over the placid Gulf of Finland awash in crimsons, blues, and pearls as dawn crept over the land. Alarmed by the crack of guns, crows cawed protests into the northern morning; a few early travelers, passing along a road fringed by a tall iron fence, also heard the echoes and momentarily stopped. On the other side of that fence sprawled the imperial estate of Peterhof. Here, sentries in blue uniforms patrolled through groves of pine, oak, and beech trees, holding tight to the reins lest their mounts become too restive or spooked by the noise. And along the edge of the water, rising against rows of reeds that gently waved in the soft wind, carriage wheels crunched over graveled drives leading to a rambling Italianate villa, where lights had burned since three that morning.

Those within the Lower Palace, as the building was called, already knew what those awakened by the guns firing a salute from the nearby naval base at Kronstadt did not: at six that morning—June 18, 1901—a fourth child had been born to Nicholas II, tsar of all the Russias, and his wife, Empress Alexandra. When the artillery count reached 101 shots, people paused; even those just starting their day twenty miles east in St. Petersburg could hear the thud of cannon. All Russia knew that the empress was expecting: after three imperial daughters—Olga, born in 1895, Tatiana in 1897, and Marie in 1899—everyone hoped for a son, an heir to the Romanov Dynasty, whose birth would be greeted by a thunderous 300 salvos. But on that morning there was no 102nd shot; the empress had given birth to yet another girl.

“My God, what a disappointment!” recorded Nicholas II’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna in her diary on hearing the news.
1
These words summed up the general feeling within the imperial family and across the Russian Empire. But if the parents were disappointed, they hid it well. In his diary, Nicholas wrote only of “a feeling of calm,” and noted that his wife “felt quite cheerful.”
2
It may have been unspoken, but both parents were keenly aware of the succession laws. Emperor Paul, who hated his mother, Catherine the Great, dictated that females could inherit the Russian throne only after all male members of the Romanov Dynasty. If Nicholas and Alexandra had no son, the crown would pass to his brother, Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, then to his uncles and to their sons, to great-uncles and to second cousins; only the deaths of all of these forty or so male relatives would allow for the succession of the new infant or her sisters.

The imperial couple temporarily set aside such worries twelve days after their new daughter’s birth when, on a glorious summer morning, the infant was christened with all the pomp and ceremony demanded by her style of imperial highness and position as a grand duchess of Russia. A string of crimson and gold carriages, carrying members of the imperial family and their guests, rolled through the park at Peterhof, passing between rows of crisply drawn sentries and alongside fountains glistening in the morning light. At intervals rode scarlet-coated Cossacks and members of the Chevalier Garde in white tunics and silver-gilt cuirasses, their ranks interrupted by marching regimental bands and by courtiers adorned with orders and awards. Finally, after much anticipation, the gilded carriage bearing the new grand duchess appeared, its six white horses led by scarlet-and-gold-liveried grooms bedecked in powdered wigs; only the parents were absent from this spectacle, forbidden by Orthodox custom from attending the solemn rite.
3

Empress Alexandra with the newborn Anastasia, 1901.

A fanfare of trumpets greeted the procession when it reached the eight-hundred-foot-long Great Palace at Peterhof; within, hundreds of aristocrats and courtiers crowded the elaborately decorated halls, medals shining against broadcloth tunics and jewels scintillating on gowns of silver tissue and velvet. Footmen and chamberlains, adjutants and ladies-in-waiting cleared the way for Princess Marie Golitsyn, the empress’s mistress of the robes, who held the infant on a cushion and carried her along a ribbon of crimson carpet to the cathedral. As a choir chanted and fragrant smoke from incense curled toward the gilded dome, Father Ioann Yanishev, personal confessor to the imperial family, took the baby from the pillow, removing the white lace christening gown before dipping her into the font three times.
4
As if prompted by some unconscious glimpse of her future, Nicholas and Alexandra gave their new daughter a name that meant Resurrection, and she was christened Anastasia.

The imperial family after the christening of Anastasia, 1901.

“Once upon a time . . .” runs the fairy tale. For Anastasia, the fairy tale began with this elaborate ceremony, which embodied all the splendid privilege of the Russian Court. Related by blood and marriage to the royal houses of Great Britain, Denmark, Romania, Germany, Spain, and Greece, she was born into a lavish world of palaces and liveried servants, gold-braided courtiers and sleek yachts, loving parents and a devoted family—everything necessary to the traditional, heartwarming conclusion. For Anastasia, though, there would be no happy ending; her fairy tale went horribly awry, its peaceful promise shattered by war and revolution. In its place arose a new tale that gave resonance to the meaning of her name, in which hope triumphed over despair, and desire transcended brutal reality. There was even a Prince Charming said to have come to Anastasia’s rescue. It all coalesced to form a powerful myth, a modern legend, a new fairy tale that, in its traumas, seemed to encapsulate the turmoil of the twentieth century.

Looking back after a century, it is difficult to imagine the opulent life into which Anastasia was born. The almost barbaric, Byzantine splendor of the imperial court endowed her life with all of the fantastic elements demanded of any good fairy tale. Nicholas II was undoubtedly the wealthiest monarch in the world. He ruled a sixth of the land surface of the globe as autocrat, responsible to no one. Instead of one palace, he owned more than thirty; there were country estates in Finland, Poland, and the Crimea; huge timber and mineral reserves in Siberia and the Caucasus; five yachts and two private trains; hundreds of horses, carriages, and new motorcars; accounts stocked with gold bullion in Moscow, London, and Berlin; thousands of works of art, including important paintings by Van Dyke, Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, and da Vinci; crowns, tiaras, necklaces, and a fortune in jewelry; and a priceless collection of objets d’art and Easter eggs by famed jeweler Peter Karl Fabergé. Cared for by a small army of cooks, maids, footmen, chamberlains, gardeners, chauffeurs, carpenters, grooms, and valets, tended by devoted courtiers who kissed their hands, and protected by thousands of soldiers and police officers, the Romanovs wanted for nothing.

And, at least at the beginning of Nicholas II’s reign, there was every hope that he would rule Russia evenly and gently, in keeping with his placid character, steering it with wisdom and foresight through the unknown waters of the early twentieth century. The eighteenth ruler in a Romanov Dynasty that included such larger-than-life figures as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Nicholas was young, handsome, and exceptionally polite when he came to the throne in 1894 following the premature death of his father, Alexander III. The country was backward and already straining under modern pressures and expectations. The vast majority of the emperor’s subjects were peasants, loyal but illiterate, consumed by the constant struggle to simply survive; then there were the workers, thousands of wretched beings who toiled in danger and misery in the great industrial factories. A small middle class had developed intellectuals and sent its sons to universities, where they readily found sympathetic comrades filled with their own horrible stories of hardship. And at the very apex of the country, separated by comforts and languages, ensconced in privilege and often more concerned with pleasure than with progress, stood the elite: the military officers, the bureaucracy, the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, the courtiers, the aristocracy, and the imperial family itself. Surely, people thought, this system could not last. The antiquated autocracy Nicholas II inherited survived only by force of character and by a tradition that insisted the emperor alone was responsible to himself and to God for governing this enormous cauldron of simmering discontent.

But then the shy, gentle, and polite Nicholas II did something that quite confounded those who hoped that such an educated, modern young man would recognize the impossibility of continued autocratic rule. Just a few months after taking the throne, he made it clear that he would never share his power with an elected assembly and that the pace of needed reforms would be miserably slow. Clinging to the idea that he had been ordained by God to rule according only to his own conscience, he saw himself as
batushka
-tsar, father of the Russian people, a benevolent and all-knowing schoolmaster suddenly confronted with a classroom of unruly pupils who needed his wisdom and his whip to maintain order. Ambition clashed with reality, and as the twentieth century began, the rumblings grew louder, the demands for reform more insistent, as the country careened from disaster to disaster: tsarist ministers and officials fell victim to a growing revolutionary movement; war between Russia and Japan ended in humiliating defeat; soldiers and sailors mutinied, peasants looted estates, and pogroms erupted with the tacit and often overt approval of the government; and by 1905, strikes and unrest had paralyzed the country. Faced with this tumult, Nicholas II reluctantly bowed to pressure and created a parliament, the Duma. This was a concession wrested rather than granted, and Nicholas could never reconcile himself to the idea that he had signed away his autocratic powers.

Nicholas II, about 1900.

An uneasy peace settled over the country in these years after the turn of the century. Thoroughly disillusioned, Nicholas II increasingly withdrew from his public duties, finding comfort only in his wife and children. It was a passion shared by his wife, Empress Alexandra. Born a princess of the German Grand Duchy of Hesse und bei Rhein, and a favorite granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alexandra—Alix, or “Sunny,” as her husband called her—was a great beauty when they married in 1894; together Nicholas and Alexandra seemed to embody the very image of the prince and princess who would indeed live happily ever after. But beneath this veneer lay something unsuspected: excessively shy, serious, and high-minded, Alexandra possessed the steely character her husband lacked. She passionately believed in the Orthodox faith she embraced upon her marriage, but she found in its mystical doctrines justification for an increasingly extreme view of her husband’s power; like Nicholas, she refused to acknowledge that the autocracy had ended, insisting that the emperor make no popular concessions. It was one of the great ironies of the tale: the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the most powerful democratic monarch on the face of the earth, soon became even more convinced of a divinely mandated autocracy than her own husband.