The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (27 page)
Read The Romanovs: The Final Chapter Online
Authors: Robert K. Massie
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #War, #Biography, #Politics
Sokolov’s investigation, not finding the bodies, further opened the door to doubt. Some accepted without question his belief that eleven people had been killed and their bodies totally destroyed. Others accepted his findings but had reservations. Still others rejected Sokolov absolutely. White Russian emigres and Western newspapers passed back and forth rumors that the murders had been a hoax. In 1920, the tsar was said to have been seen in the streets of London, his hair snow white. Another story placed him in Rome, hidden in the Vatican by the pope. The entire Imperial family was said to be aboard a ship cruising eternally through the waters of the White Sea, never touching land.
The confusion over the death of the Imperial family, and the multitude of contradictory stories in the Soviet Union and the West, made almost inevitable what happened next. Over the years, dozens of claimants stepped forward, presenting themselves as this or that member of the Imperial family. Nicholas and Alexandra did not reappear (although in one version, they were reported to have escaped to Poland), but all of the five children appeared in different times and places. The Soviet Union (now Russia and other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States) produced the largest assemblage:
A young woman claiming to be Anastasia, whose documents named her as Nadezhda Ivanova Vasilyeva, appeared in Siberia in
1920, trying to make her way to China. She was arrested and shuttled between prisons in Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, Leningrad, and, finally, an island gulag in the White Sea. In 1934, she was dispatched to a prison hospital in Kazan, from where she wrote letters in French and German to King George V (“Uncle George”) pleading for help. For a brief period in the hospital, she changed her story and said that she was the daughter of a Riga merchant. She died in an asylum in 1971, but, according to the head of the Kazan hospital, “except for her claim that she was Anastasia, she was completely sane.”
Not long ago, Edvard Radzinsky traveled “one day by train, one day by bus, one day by horse” to a remote village in the Urals which believed that it had given refuge in 1919 to the tsar’s two youngest daughters, Marie and Anastasia. The grand duchesses, Radzinsky was told, had lived together as nuns “in terrible poverty, afraid every day,” sheltered by the local priest, until they died, both in 1964. The villagers showed Radzinsky the tombstones inscribed “Marie Nicholaevna” and “Anastasia Nicholaevna.” Radzinsky himself gave some credence to a story he was told about a former gulag prisoner named Filipp Grigorievich Semyonov, who claimed to have been the Tsarevich Alexis. Described as “a rather tall man, somewhat stout, sloping shoulders, slightly round-shouldered … a long, pale face, blue or grey slightly bulging eyes, a high forehead,” Semyonov had served in the Red Army as a cavalryman, studied economics in Baku, and worked as an economist in Central Asia. In 1949, he turned up in a psychiatric hospital where he was classified as an “acute psychotic.” Questioned by Soviet doctors, the patient knew more about the names and titles of the Imperial family, the Imperial palaces, and court protocol and ceremonies than his interrogators. He also had a cryptorchidism (one undescended testicle), which the examining physician said he had been told was the case with the tsarevich. His hemophilia, apparently untroublesome during his years in the Red cavalry, “returned,” Radzinsky said, “two months before his death.”
The Semyonov story attracted the attention of Vladimir Soloviev and the Office of the Public Prosecutor. “Semyonov was
a puzzling, very doubtful person,” Soloviev said. “He was arrested during the war. Men leaving for the front were given money, and he stole that money, one hundred thousand rubles. He was sentenced to death, and then he remembered that he was the tsarevich. They sent him to a mental hospital, and that is how he avoided the death penalty. He wound up as a worker in the morgue, the lowest position, carrying corpses.” Radzinsky possessed a photograph of Semyonov, which, in the playwright’s view, bore a similarity to the thirteen-year-old tsarevich. In the opinion of others, there was no resemblance.
Alexander Avdonin had several large files filled with letters and photographs sent by the “children” and then the “grandchildren” of Nicholas II. Turning through them, he said, “Here is Alexis and here is his daughter.… This is Marie Nicholaevna.… Here is the daughter of Olga Nicholaevna; she is one of two daughters of Olga.… There is Anastasia … there is the daughter of Anastasia … and there is the grandson of Anastasia.… Here is another Anastasia.” Avdonin did not mock these people; because they wrote to him mostly pitiable letters, he was sympathetic. “I wish that we could afford to do blood testing or DNA testing on all of them,” he said. “So that they would know who they are. And who they are not.”
In Europe, other claimants appeared. A woman named Marga Boodts, living in a villa on Lake Como in Italy, declared that she was the tsar’s oldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga; the money supporting her was said to come from the pope and the former kaiser.
Another daughter, Grand Duchess Tatiana, was reported to have been rescued from Siberia by British agents in an airplane and flown to Vladivostok, then carried across the Pacific to Canada in a Japanese battleship, then escorted across Canada and across the Atlantic to England, arriving one month after the executions in Ekaterinburg. A different story depicts Tatiana as a belly dancer and prostitute in Constantinople, from which plight she was rescued by a British officer who married her. This woman, Larissa Feodorovna Tudor, died in 1927 and is buried in a graveyard in Kent.
The tsar’s third daughter, Marie, is said to have escaped to Rumania, where she married and bore a child named Olga-Beata. Olga-Beata, in turn, had a son, who lived in Madrid as Prince Alexis d’Anjou de Bourbon-Condé Romanov-Dolgoruky. In 1994, the prince proclaimed himself “His Imperial and Royal Highness, Hereditary Grand Duke and Tsarevich of Russia, King of Ukraine, and Grand Duke of Kiev.” In 1971, the Dolgoruky family and the Association of Descendants of the Russian Nobility of Belgium brought an action in a Belgian court against “Prince Alexis,” charging that he was in fact a Belgian citizen named Alex Brimeyer. The court sentenced Brimeyer-Dolgoruky-Romanov to eighteen months in jail. In 1995, he died in Spain.
After the Second World War, a Tsarevich Alexis appeared in Ulm, Germany. This claimant had served as a major in the Red Air Force, biding his time, he said, to escape from the Soviet Union. Once in Ulm, he worked for many years as a plant technician, not revealing his true identity until his final years.
Other tsareviches sprang up in North America. Mrs. Sandra Romanov of Vancouver, British Columbia, believes that her husband, Alexei Tammet-Romanov, who died of leukemia in 1977, was the son of the tsar. She is willing to have his body exhumed so that a DNA test can be performed.
There was the robust Prince Alexis Romanov, who lived his last thirty years in Scottsdale, Arizona, and died in 1986. This entrepreneurial tsarevich operated a perfume and jewelry store and marketed a brand of vodka called Alexis. According to the label, it was “a special distillation to the specification of Prince Alexis Romanov, who is a direct descendant of Tsar Nicholas Romanov, Tsar of All the Russias.” Prince Alexis lived colorfully, dating movie stars, marrying five times, and earning a reputation as a polo player. Polo is a violent sport; he admitted that, over forty years, he had suffered eleven broken bones. His fifth and final wife fell in love with him when she first saw him on horseback. “He was the most elegant rider I have ever seen,” she said. “He looked like part of the horse. When he rode in the lot next to the Hilton, traffic would be tied up from people stopping to watch.”
Recently, a son of another Tsarevich Alexis, who says that his father was assassinated in Chicago by the KGB, appeared in Washington, D.C. He says that he had secret meetings with Vice President Dan Quayle and Secretary of State James A. Baker III and that they told him, “We know who you are. Hold yourself in readiness.”
In the early 1960s, two claimants appeared in the United States who managed to attract the attention of national newspapers and publishing houses. Ultimately, they met. One was an Alexis, the other an Anastasia.
On April 1, 1958, the American ambassador in Bern, Switzerland, received an anonymous letter written in German, postmarked in Zurich. The author, describing himself as a senior official in a Soviet Bloc national intelligence service, offered his services to the U.S. government and asked that his letter be forwarded to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. For twenty-four months, this agent, using the code name Heckenschuetze (German for sharpshooter or sniper), passed more than two thousand microfilm documents to the Central Intelligence Agency. Unwilling to reveal his name or country of origin, this spy exposed a number of KGB moles planted inside Western governments and intelligence agencies; these agents included Stig Wennerström, George Blake, Gordon Lonsdale, Israel Beer, Heinz Felfe, and John Vassal.
The mystery as to the agent’s identity seemed to have ended in December 1960, when a man speaking English telephoned the U.S. Consulate in West Berlin and announced that he was Heckenschuetze. Saying that his life was threatened, he declared that he was coming over. On Christmas Day, Heckenschuetze crossed into West Berlin. He turned out to be a husky, dark-haired man with blue eyes, a protruding lower lip, and a flourishing guardsman’s mustache. The defector presented his name and identity papers. He was, apparently, Lt. Col. Michael Goleniewski, a senior officer of Polish Army Military Intelligence. Later, Goleniewski elaborated: “From 1957 to 1960, I was the head of the Technical and Scientific Department of the Polish
Secret Service. This function led me to foreign travel, which was very important for my clandestine activities. I had close ties with influential people in the KGB without ever having belonged to it.” An American intelligence official explained, “Goleniewski was in Polish Military Intelligence. But at the same time he was employed by the Russians to keep tabs on all Polish intelligence services and personalities in Poland and in the West.”
Colonel Goleniewski was shocked and displeased by the reception party which greeted him. He had expected to be met by agents of the FBI. Through all his months of service, he had believed that he was dealing directly with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Although he knew that by law the CIA is responsible for espionage conducted by the United States outside American territory, Goleniewski had deliberately intended to bypass it in the belief that it had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. His mistake about the identity of his American handlers had been accepted and encouraged: all messages sent back to him had been signed “Hoover.” Nevertheless, the men waiting in Berlin to receive him were agents of the CIA. Colonel Goleniewski never met Hoover; the nearest he got was a tour of the FBI building in Washington, in which he was shown the Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde exhibits, a display on the crime laboratory and fingerprints, and a number of portraits and photographs of J. Edgar Hoover.
On January 12, 1961, Goleniewski arrived in the United States from Germany on a U.S. military plane. Given an employment contract and a stipend from the U.S. government, he worked for almost three years with CIA debriefing officers, describing Soviet intelligence techniques and operations and pinpointing the names of Communist agents in various Western countries. On September 30, 1961, he had a one-hour meeting with CIA director Allen Dulles. The agency had not yet moved into its quarters in Langley, Virginia, and the only detail the visitor remembered was Dulles’s concern that his new office would lack sufficient wall space to mount his extensive collection of pipes. The conversation, according to Goleniewski, was vague and noncommittal.
