The Resurrection of the Romanovs (52 page)

So what did really happen in Ekaterinburg? Woken in the middle of the night, a sleepy Anastasia had followed her family down the narrow Ipatiev House stairway, followed Yakov Yurovsky out into the courtyard and back inside the mansion’s ground floor, through a warren of corridors to the small storeroom from which there was no escape. They waited, the Romanovs, Dr. Botkin, and the three retainers imprisoned with them, Alexandra sitting in one chair, a sickly-looking Tsesarevich Alexei in another, and the four grand duchesses standing near the back of the room. It was two-thirty in the morning.
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And then Yurovsky reappeared, standing with a grim-looking group that filled the room’s only exit. There were gasps, low screams, sobs when Yurovsky announced that the Ural Regional Soviet had condemned Nicholas II to death; even in these last few seconds, did the Romanovs believe that only the tsar was to be killed? Yurovsky mercifully said nothing of the rest of the family; then the guns appeared, shining in the light of a single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling, the shots began, and mercy disappeared in a haze of smoke. Nicholas fell under a barrage of bullets; so, too, did valet Alexei Trupp and cook Ivan Kharitonov; Alexandra had time only to cross herself before a shot tore through her skull, knocking her backward, off her chair, and onto the floor where her daughters stood, untouched. Bullets ricocheted around the walls; within a few seconds, smoke from the guns filled the room with a noxious fog that sent the assassins stumbling for air as the cellar echoed with terrified sobs and pleas for help.
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Anastasia was still alive, at the back of the room, with her sisters, screaming, when the men came back. Trying to raise himself up from the floor, Dr. Botkin was shot through the head; Alexei sat petrified as the bullets poured into his frail body until he finally collapsed. Then they came for them, the grand duchesses who had flirted with young officers, who had danced across the deck of the imperial yacht, who had walked in white dresses and elegant picture hats before newsreel cameras, who had nursed and tended to wounded soldiers as their father’s empire edged toward disaster, and who now stumbled and slipped across a floor slick with their parents’ blood. The bullets came now, hitting them, striking the protective layers of jewels concealed beneath their blouses, driving them back but leaving them alive. The men came closer: Olga and Tatiana fell, shot through their heads. And then the men turned on the two youngest daughters, stabbing at them with bayonets as they hurled themselves in vain against a set of locked doors at the back of the room. And still they lived, hidden jewels deflecting the flashing blades. Finally one of the men drunkenly aimed his gun and shot at their heads as the others turned their bayonets on the maid Anna Demidova until the room fell silent.
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The silence of death: it lay across the terrible jumble of bodies and blood-spattered walls. But Anastasia was still alive, and Marie, too, for as their bodies were carried to a Fiat truck that stood waiting in the courtyard, first one, then the other, suddenly sat up, coughing blood, moaning, screaming. They were outside now, and the men couldn’t shoot them; the bayonets came out, slashing through the air, but the knives struck the hidden jewels. And so someone grabbed a rifle, turned it around, and hammered away at the barely conscious faces, driving the wooden stock down again and again and again.
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Battered into silence, choking on splintered bone and shattered teeth, drowning in her own blood—this was how Anastasia died.

Two days passed, days in which Anastasia’s stiff and bloodied body, stripped naked, was cast down the abandoned Four Brothers mine shaft in the Koptyaki Forest with the rest of the victims; in which it, and the other bodies, was tied with ropes and pulled back out of the shaft, thrown on the ground, and covered with brush; in which it, bruised and bloated in the Siberian summer, was hurled onto the back of a truck and driven through the night until the truck broke down in a forest clearing called Pig’s Meadow. Yurovsky’s men dug a pit in the rutted roadway and tossed the corpses into the grave—all, that is, except for Anastasia and Alexei, who were dragged some two hundred feet across the wet grass and through the muddy meadow, where a bonfire had been hastily built. First one, then the other was flung atop the glowing timbers, doused with gasoline, consigned to the consuming flames. Two shallow pits received what, after ninety minutes, remained of the charred bodies, covered with dirt and ash, packed down, concealed, hidden for nearly ninety years.
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For sixteen years following the 1991 exhumation of the nine sets of remains from the mass grave, geologists, archaeologists, historians, and amateur investigators searched through the Koptyaki Forest, searched for this missing grave, for these missing remains. They mapped every foot of Pig’s Meadow, dug it up with shovels and spades and tractors, sifted through the upturned soil for a single bone splinter, a single tooth. It wasn’t a question of endless acres of forest: if Yurovsky was telling the truth about burning and burying the two corpses in the meadow, someone, sometime, should have found something. But sixteen years passed, years without a single, identifiable bone fragment. The DNA tests had resolved the Romanov mystery and the identity of Anna Anderson, but history and science could not definitively answer the most intriguing question—the fate of Anastasia.

But then it happened—unlikely; unexpected; perhaps, even, to the more conspiratorially minded, unconvincing: in August 2007, a group of Ekaterinburg historians and archaeologists discovered two shallow pits in a low rise at the edge of Pig’s Meadow, two hundred feet from the cross marking the site of the mass grave. Within, they found forty-eight highly fragmented bones, including a piece of skull, a pelvic bone, shattered femurs, seven teeth, ribs, and arm bones: all showed signs of having been burnt, and several bore indications of possible gunshot wounds and possible hacking apart by axes prior to being consigned to the bonfire.
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Examination established that they came from two separate individuals, a male of between twelve and fifteen years, and a female approximately fifteen to nineteen years old. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Maryland, which had previously worked on the Romanov and Anderson cases, as well as the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, received samples for genetic testing. Analysis by Dr. Michael Coble of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and his colleagues revealed, using nuclear DNA testing, that both sets of remains had been Nicholas and Alexandra’s children, while mitochondrial tests confirmed their maternal descent from the empress. Only one teenage male, Tsesarevich Alexei, had disappeared, making his identification easiest.

And Anastasia? When the remains of Olga, Tatiana, and Marie were exhumed from the mass grave in 1991, each had their femurs intact; the discovery of a fragmented female femur, as Dr. Coble wryly noted, closed the door to any idea of “Yurovsky taking a portion of the femurs from the first grave and sneakily burying them nearby.”
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The shattered femur, shown to belong to a female, shown to be from a daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra, shown to be a descendant of the empress—this and a few charred bone fragments were all that remained of Russia’s most famous Grand Duchess.
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The myth that Franziska had made seem so convincing, so real, for so many years, was over: Anastasia was no longer missing.

In 1967, in an unguarded moment while speaking with Alexei Miliukov, Franziska spoke of “who I am, and who I pretend to be.”
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It was the second and last time that she admitted her deception, but the remark passed unnoticed. Propelled by favorable assumptions and a shifting prism of truth, Franziska’s story spiraled beyond her own control and entered the realm of legend, where the few verifiable facts of her case slipped into obscurity as the myth assumed a life of its own.

Was she victim or villain? The portrait of Franziska that emerges is neither black nor white, neither entirely calculated nor ruled by a confused mind. From a nomadic childhood, a youth of indulgence and unsavory rumors, she developed into a singular young woman of fragile emotions and warring personalities, deprived of maternal affection and bereft of comforting influences. Her experiences in Berlin—the loss of a fiancé, pregnancy, the accident at AEG—shattered whatever stability she had temporarily achieved; a nervous breakdown led to involuntary commitment, to declarations of insanity. She found no comfort in her 1917 return to Hygendorf; attacked at Gut-Friederikenhof, left physically battered, she staggered from crisis to crisis, from impoverished despair to rumors of prostitution until the weight of a hopeless life drove her into the waters of the Landwehr Canal.

And what began as a ploy for a few extra privileges, a few special attentions, this claim to be Anastasia, soon became something more as the possibilities stretched before Franziska, weaving an alluring and ready lifeline to a woman desperately in need of salvation. It all came together in a most extraordinary way, a series of coincidences that coincided with desire. In 1922, when word of her claim spread through émigré circles in Berlin, there wasn’t any real evidence proving that Anastasia had perished in Ekaterinburg. Reported sightings, whispers of escape, and persistent rumors all played into Franziska’s hands, giving her story a veneer of unlikely plausibility—a situation that wouldn’t change until a decade after her death. She found a group of uncertain Russian émigrés still traumatized by the Revolution, a fractured collection of refugees divided by loyalties and beliefs and ruled by hope. Scarred by the loss of their country, their titles, and their fortunes, many were susceptible to any echo from their vanished past. Her claim played upon these dreams, where intriguing possibility joined force with a deeper need, a psychological desire, to make sense of overwhelming loss.

It was a performance so apparently convincing that even after the 1994 DNA tests, no one could answer any of the lingering questions. But Franziska’s claim—and her abilities—evolved in a natural fashion as she assimilated information and grew into the role of Anastasia. At first she said little, offering few details to support her claim, but increased exposure to former aristocrats, courtiers, and published materials allowed her to add names and dates to her tale, to recognize faces and places as she built her identity. She understood desire—the desire from those she met, those who wanted to be convinced, and from the world at large. And the world, through the efforts of Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann, Gleb Botkin, Dominique Auclères, and Peter Kurth, through the sympathetic newspapers and magazines, through the performance of Ingrid Bergman, viewed her as a woman wronged, a tragic figure, the living embodiment of an exotic and brilliant vanished past. Anastasia was an unremarkable young woman when she stepped across the threshold of that cellar room in the Ipatiev House; it was her rumored survival as Anna Anderson that made her extraordinary.

Chance and coincidence aided Franziska, but she was, in her own right, a remarkable woman. Someone of fewer capabilities and dedication, who lacked the mental acumen to absorb the myriad details that came her way, would undoubtedly have failed in the difficult quest she set for herself. Martin Knopf, the detective working for Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig, made an important observation: “There is a difference,” he wrote in his report on Franziska, “between being uneducated and incapable of education. She was quite capable of educating herself.”
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It was Franziska’s genius and her gift that she understood precisely what was needed to make her claim seem possible; that she knew when to retreat if danger threatened; and that she knew how to deploy her considerable personal charm to best present herself as a viable pretender. That she continues to arouse strong passions is scarcely surprising, given the length of her claim and the extent to which it became a part of twentieth-century popular culture; she still has believers, even in the face of the DNA results, people sincerely troubled—as we once were—by previously unanswered questions in her case. And she has an oddly vocal group of modern critics, those with no connection to the story but who, ruled by sentimental nostalgia for the vanished Romanovs, disdain the very mention of her name, insisting that discussion of her claim somehow insults the memory of the real Anastasia. But those who would confine Franziska to a grudging footnote do history a disservice, ignoring her singular place in the story of the last Romanovs.

If Franziska was coldly calculating, especially after her temporary disappearance in 1922, she also paid a high price for her charade, condemned to forever dwell in a world she could not escape. Hers became a kind of twilight existence: she could never force her claim and risk exposure, nor could she simply abandon the pretense for fear of legal repercussions. She once confessed to Tatiana Botkin that she bore a heavy burden on her conscience, perhaps an acknowledgment that years of deception had taken an emotional toll.
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Condemned to exist in a netherworld of uncertainty and ambiguity, Franziska could only transform herself into the curious figure of Anna Anderson, a phantom grand duchess forever doomed to haunt the Romanov story.

It is impossible to know if, in the end, Franziska’s brain ever crossed that intangible line between fantasy and reality, if she actually, in her last years, came to believe and embrace the lie she had woven over the decades. But in a very real sense, she became Anastasia. It was, after all, a more emotionally satisfying and perhaps even believable life than the one she had so willingly abandoned. Franziska lived for eighty-seven years; of these, she spent sixty-four, three quarters of her life, as the would-be grand duchess. This reality, this purloined life, ironically rescued the real Anastasia from obscurity. Through Franziska, Anastasia survived the execution in Ekaterinburg, appeared before a fascinated public in books and magazines, and gazed out from across time in the motion pictures that kept her story alive. It is the greatest irony in Franziska’s tale: the farm girl from an obscure German village turned the real grand duchess, whose name appropriately meant “Resurrection,” into a modern legend.