The Lost Crown (45 page)

The most famous claimant is, of course, Anna Anderson, an eccentric, charismatic woman who declared for six decades that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. (In fact, over two hundred people have pretended to be survivors of the Ekaterinburg massacre, most of them posing as Aleksei or Maria.) After her death, DNA tests plainly contradicted Anderson’s claim, linking her to a family of Kashubian peasants instead of the Romanovs. Reluctant to give up hope, Anderson’s staunchest supporters questioned the results on several grounds. Nevertheless, a second round of DNA tests in late 2010 upheld the original findings.

In 1991, when a group of Russians announced publicly that they had found the tsar’s grave, only nine skeletons lay tangled in the pit: four servants and five members of the imperial family. Examination of the remains determined that Aleksei and one of his two youngest sisters were missing, prompting survival theories to flare once again despite the eventual DNA tests that would refute Anna Anderson’s famous claim. Controversy also erupted over which of the four grand duchesses was missing—the Russian forensic team believes Maria’s body is absent, while an American group sees Anastasia as the more likely candidate. (Individual DNA profiles for the grand duchesses do not exist, so identification of their remains hinges on factors like height, facial reconstruction, and skeletal development. Only Skeleton Number 3, with its prominent forehead, has been identified with any certainty as Olga Nikolaevna.) When the nine skeletons were finally buried in a state funeral at St. Petersburg’s Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul on July 17, 1998, the youngest sets of remains were interred below markers bearing the names Tatiana Nikolaevna and Anastasia Nikolaevna, though the dispute over the identities of Skeletons Number 5 and Number 6 has never been conclusively put to rest.

Then, in the summer of 2007, searchers unearthed a second shallow pit containing several dozen charred bone fragments, teeth, and a scrap of cloth similar to the sailor-style undergarments Aleksei favored. It now appears that Yurovsky’s story about burning two bodies was not a ruse after all; DNA tests have shown these fragments are almost certainly the remains of the tsarevich Aleksei and his sister. The same series of tests also revealed that Skeleton Number 6, one of the three grand duchesses in the original grave, was indeed a carrier of type B hemophilia.

The Imperial Family, 1913 (Courtesy of Kelly Wright)

Maria, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Olga, 1914 (Marlene A. Eilers Koenig collection)

Tsar Nicholas II and his children at
Stavka
, 1916
(General collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

The grand duchesses resting between tennis matches with an officer, 1914
(General collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

The Big Pair working in the lazaret, 1914 (General collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

The Little Pair posing in the wards, 1914 (General collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Tatiana, Anastasia, and Ortipo, photographed by Maria in June 1917 (Courtesy of Kori Lawrence)

Olga, Nicholas, Anastasia, and Tatiana on the greenhouse roof at Tobolsk, 1918 (General collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For over ninety years, studying the history of the last tsar and his family has been a murky, mine-filled proposition. Opinions vary widely, and tempers run high. Fans and historians alike argue over whether Tsar Nicholas II was a malleable despot or a mild-mannered daddy. Was Alexandra a hysterical religious fanatic or a painfully shy woman afflicted with anxiety disorders? Depending on who you ask, their five children might have been angels or hooligans. From violently anti-Semitic Soviet tracts to the moistly sentimental memoirs of friends and courtiers, there is plenty to sort and sift. Where the Romanovs’ captivity and execution are concerned, myths and misremembrances sometimes snowball into outright lies, and contradictions abound.

Fortunately, the Bolsheviks preserved mountains of the imperial family’s letters, diaries, and photographs, though the Soviets kept the archives sealed for decades. With the fall of the USSR, however, the personal documents of the last tsar’s family began to trickle, then flood, from behind closed doors.

As often as possible, I relied on those documents and photographs, which number in the hundreds of thousands, to guide me. When that proved impossible, I turned to memoirs of the people who shared the Romanovs’ final years, particularly favoring those who wrote down their impressions as events unfolded. Even then, the testimony of firsthand witnesses diverged time and again. What’s an author to do?

In the end, I trusted my own collective impressions of my characters. Aside from the inevitable jiggling of the chronology inherent in fiction, I occasionally made choices to best serve my story, but only when the history itself provided no clear hints. Specifically:

OTMA and Politics

It is impossible to know how much the Romanov children understood about the revolution, or the danger their family faced under captivity. None of the grand duchesses’ post-revolutionary diaries have survived, yet the fact that Maria and Anastasia burned their 1918 diaries before being transferred to Ekaterinburg perhaps speaks for itself. At the very least, the children were aware of the news headlines, and I don’t believe they could have been immune to the tension mounting in the Ipatiev house in late June and early July. Even so, I have very likely portrayed them as more informed than they actually were. On the whole, their lives were sheltered, and their education lackluster. Their contemplation and experience of the world outside the imperial parks and palaces was limited. Captivity didn’t change that fact. To some observers, the Little Pair seemed content and more or less oblivious in Tobolsk. Olga, however, has gained a reputation for being sensitive, insightful, and perceptive. Although I think that’s an exaggeration and do not believe she was especially gifted, I have nonetheless made use of that view of Olga in service to my story. While there is some evidence to suggest that Olga and Tatiana were more aware of the family’s peril than their younger siblings, I myself don’t believe Olga had any reason to suspect they would all be executed.