The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (29 page)

During her years in Illinois, Mrs. Smith received only slight attention from the press and public. She had no support from a local Romanov, but here the fault was her own. When stories appeared, announcing that Grand Duchess Anastasia was living in Elmhurst, Prince Rostislav of Russia, Nicholas II’s nephew, also happened to be living in Chicago. His first wife, Alexandra, had divorced him and married Lawrence Armour, a banker. Mrs. Armour heard that one of her former husband’s relatives was living nearby in Elmhurst, so she phoned and invited Mrs. Smith to lunch. The party, she said, would also include her ex-husband, because Prince Rostislav was eager to see his cousin Anastasia, who had been a childhood playmate. Three times Mrs. Armour issued this invitation; each time Mrs. Smith developed a headache and declined to go, explaining that she was too nervous to see her cousin.

When Eugenia Smith first brought her manuscript to her publisher, Robert Speller & Sons in New York, she did not claim to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. Instead, she said that she had been a friend of the grand duchess, who, before she died in 1920, had entrusted her with personal notes. Soon afterward, Mrs. Smith amended her tale:
now she became the grand duchess. She said that she had escaped from Ekaterinburg and Russia to Rumania. In October 1918—three months after the Ekaterinburg massacre—she married a Croatian Catholic, Marijan Smetisko. One child, a daughter, had died in infancy. In 1922, she received her husband’s permission to come to America; her immigration papers that year listed her as Eugenia Smetisko. She landed in New York, stopped briefly in Detroit, and then went to Chicago. Her marriage dissolved a few years later, and she became a salesgirl, a model, a milliner, a lecturer, and a seller of perfume. During World War II, she became a U.S. citizen and worked in a defense plant. After the war, she moved in with Mrs. Emery.

Life
presented the story as a mystery, still unsolved, and offered evidence for and against its subject. A polygraph expert, hired by the magazine, questioned Mrs. Smith for thirty hours and then declared that he was virtually positive his subject was Anastasia. Two anthropologists, comparing photographs of Anastasia and Mrs. Smith, declared that they could not possibly be pictures of the same woman. A graphologist, studying handwriting samples, agreed with the anthropologists. Princess Nina Chavchavzdze, a cousin who had played with Anastasia in Russia until both were thirteen, met Mrs. Smith and also concluded that she was bogus. Tatiana Botkin, daughter of the tsar’s doctor, killed with the family, read Mrs. Smith’s book and compiled a twenty-page list of specific errors; she also pointed out a number of remarkable similarities between passages in her own book about the Imperial family and passages in Mrs. Smith’s book.
Life
located a Croatian named Marijan Smetisko through the address listed in Mrs. Smith’s immigration papers; he said that he had never known any woman named Eugenia and had never been married to anyone other than his current wife.

Two months after the
Life
article was published, Colonel Goleniewski appeared on Eugenia Smith’s doorstep. At that time, Goleniewski was still under wraps at the CIA, and no one in America outside the intelligence agency and the FBI had heard of him. On December 28, 1963, he phoned Mrs. Smith’s publisher and asked for an appointment to see her. He did not use the name Goleniewski; instead, he called himself Mr. Borg. Mrs. Smith agreed, and a meeting
between the two pretenders, supposedly brother and sister, took place on December 31. Goleniewski said that he had been trying for two years to get the CIA to help him find his sister in America. He told her briefly about his life and brought her up to date on their family: “Your sister Marie is in Warsaw … Mother died in Warsaw.… In 1952, I buried our father with my own hands. He was a very good Russian man.… I was two times a child because of my sickness.”

Mrs. Smith listened for a while and then burst out passionately, “He knows. He knows. He is my brother Alexis. My darling. My darling.”

This emotional meeting was followed by three more during the next several weeks, during which time Mrs. Smith called Goleniewski “my brother, Alexis.” But an awkward fact intruded on their relationship: in her book, Mrs. Smith had said that she was the only Romanov to survive Ekaterinburg. Her publisher pointed out that public recognition of the man as her brother would require Mrs. Smith to admit that she had not told the truth. Mrs. Smith refused to change her story, and, inevitably, the relationship between the “siblings” began to deteriorate.

Michael Goleniewski and Eugenia Smith did not see each other again, but he continued to assert that she was his sister Anastasia. Later, he reported that she had died in New York City in 1968. She was murdered, he said, after a visit by “very powerful men … two of them were Rockefellers.”
^*

The women who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia were challenged by relatives who tested their memories, anthropologists who measured their faces, and graphologists who studied their handwriting. The men aspiring to be accepted as the Tsarevich Alexis faced a more difficult test. Nicholas II’s only son suffered from hemophilia. This is a hereditary, noncurable disease, transmitted by mothers to
their sons. It meant that the tsarevich’s blood did not clot as does most people’s. A bump or bruise rupturing a tiny vessel beneath the skin could begin a slow seepage of blood into surrounding muscle and tissue. Instead of clotting quickly, the blood would have continued to flow, creating a swelling or hematoma, sometimes as big as an orange or a grapefruit. There were no transfusions of blood or blood fraction—as there are today—which could halt the bleeding. Eventually, when the skin was filled with blood, pressure on the torn vessel would slow the hemorrhage and allow a clot to form. Then, over weeks, the process of reabsorption would take place, turning the skin from a shiny purple to a mottled yellow-green. A simple scratch on a finger was not dangerous. Minor cuts and scratches anywhere on the surface of the body were treated with pressure and tight bandaging, which pinched off the blood and permitted the flesh to heal over. Exceptions were hemorrhages inside the mouth or nose, areas which could not be bandaged.

The permanent crippling effect of Alexis’s hemophilia came from bleeding into the joints. Blood entering the confined space of an elbow, a knee, or an ankle caused pressure on the nerves, which inflicted intense pain. Sometimes the cause of the injury was apparent, sometimes not. In either case, Alexis awakened in the morning and called out, “Mama, I cannot walk today” or “Mama, I cannot bend my elbow.” At first, as the limb flexed, leaving the largest possible area in the joint socket for the inflowing fluids, the pain was small. Then, as the space filled, it began to hurt. When the pain obliterated everything else from his consciousness, Alexis still was able to cry, “Mama, help me, help me!” Doctors were summoned, ice packs applied, prayers offered. Nothing helped. Then Gregory Rasputin, the Siberian peasant reported to have miraculous powers of faith healing, was brought to Alexandra.

Each bleeding episode added to the damage. Once inside a joint, blood had a corrosive effect, destroying bone, cartilage, and tissue. As bone formation changed, limbs locked in bent positions. There was no rehabilitation other than rest and waiting for the hematoma to be reabsorbed. The best therapy was constant exercise and massage, but this risked recommencing the hemorrhage. When Alexis reached age
five, two sailors from the Imperial navy were assigned to protect him every minute. When he was sick, they carried him; many photographs and movies of Imperial ceremonies under Nicholas II depict the tsar and the empress walking along, nodding and bowing, followed by a large sailor carrying a handsome six-, eight-, or ten-year-old boy.

When the revolution came, this protection and care were stripped away. One of the two sailor-attendants deserted; the other eventually was taken and shot. Alexis was well during the first seven months of the family’s imprisonment in Tobolsk. Then, in April, seeking an outlet for his energy, he carried a sled to the top of an indoor staircase and rode it down. He fell and began to bleed into the groin. During the remaining four months of his life, he could not walk. When a troop of cavalry arrived in Tobolsk, sent by Moscow to bring the Imperial family to the capital, Alexis was too ill to travel and was left behind. Three weeks later, he joined his parents in Ekaterinburg. During the family’s final imprisonment in the Ipatiev House, Alexis remained most of the day in bed in his parents’ room. On the night of July 16, 1918, when Yurovsky came for the family, Nicholas carried his son down the stairs into the cellar.

It is inconceivable that a hemophiliac could survive the carnage in Ipatiev’s cellar. Nevertheless, if—somehow—Alexis had been saved and had been carried thousands of miles to political safety, his medical prospects still would have been dismal. Hemophiliacs born at the beginning of this century spent much of their lives in beds and wheelchairs, their limbs contorted by permanent joint damage. Many perished by the time they were twenty; most others were dead before thirty. Today, hemophilia can be treated, but it cannot be cured.

CHAPTER 14
 
 THE CLAIMANT

O
ne Romanov claim stood apart from the others. From her appearance in 1920 to her death in 1984, the identity of the woman known variously as Fräulein Unbekannt (Miss Unknown), Mrs. Alexander Tschaikovsky, Anna Anderson, Anastasia Manahan, and Franziska Schanzkowska was one of the celebrated mysteries of the twentieth century. She insisted that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, Nicholas II’s youngest daughter. The survivors of the revolution, some of whom had known Anastasia well, disagreed passionately among themselves about the legitimacy of this claim. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grand dukes, grand duchesses, former ladies-in-waiting, former nursemaids, tutors, army officers, officers of the Imperial yacht, even Nicholas II’s former mistress, were called upon or presented themselves to give opinions. They made declarations, signed affidavits,
gave interviews, and wrote books. Her cause called up devotion and personal sacrifice from an international legion of supporters. At the same time, it brought down, upon her, her supporters, and her opponents, denunciation, lawsuits, and, in some cases, financial ruin. When she died, the solution appeared no closer than it had been sixty-four years earlier, when she first appeared.