The Resurrection of the Romanovs (17 page)

Gerda von Kleist, the baron’s youngest daughter, later commented that even in these early days the claimant “paid absolutely no attention” to actively advancing her case.
34
This was quite true. Her only concession was to clarify her asserted identity—a necessity given Peuthert’s belief that she was Tatiana. At the end of her first week with the von Kleists, the baron pressed the issue, handing her a paper on which he had written the names of all four of Nicholas and Alexandra’s daughters and asking who she was. She took a pen and underlined the name “Anastasia”; a few weeks later, she repeated this to the baroness.
35
This resolved one issue, but no one knew precisely what to call her—“Fraulein Unbekannt” no longer seemed appropriate, but neither did “Your Imperial Highness.” The claimant resolved the issue, asking that the von Kleists “not observe” the etiquette her alleged position as a grand duchess would have demanded, and settled on temporarily being called “Fraulein Annie.”
36

Fraulein Annie offered little proof to support her claim in these early days, though occasionally odd little incidents seemed compelling. One day, it was later said, Zenaide Tolstoy was visiting the von Kleist apartment, sitting at the piano in the drawing room and idly playing a waltz. The claimant, on hearing the tune, was said to have reacted in “shock” and erupted into tears; Tolstoy’s brother had composed the song and she herself had often played it for the grand duchesses at Tsarskoye Selo before the Revolution. Tolstoy took this as convincing evidence that the claimant was Anastasia, for who else would have recognized such an obscure tune?
37

The “Piano Story” soon became famous in the mythology of the claimant’s case, yet as a piece of evidence it was seriously flawed. In her own affidavit on the case, Tolstoy made no mention of this supposedly pivotal incident, a curious omission if it had actually revealed what she took to be the claimant’s intimate knowledge.
38
In fact, it was Baroness Marie von Kleist who repeated the story, apparently secondhand from her husband, several years after it supposedly occurred. In her statement, she recorded simply, “Frau Tolstoy sat at the piano and played waltzes from the old days. After this, Frau Tolstoy told me she was convinced that ‘Fraulein Unbekannt’ was Grand Duchess Anastasia.”
39
There was nothing here of the claimant’s reaction, and no indication that she had recognized the tune.

There were other curiosities, things that seemed somehow just a bit suspect. Early in her stay with the von Kleists, Fraulein Annie asked the baron to inform her relatives in Paris of her survival. “I pointed out to her,” he recorded, “that it would be better not to notify her relatives in Paris, for in my opinion, it would be proper first to inform her relatives who were in Denmark.”
40
The baron thought it odd that Anastasia would not immediately think of her grandmother Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna in Copenhagen, or even of Empress Alexandra’s siblings in Germany. She also asked him to contact Nicholas II’s sister Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna: “I liked this aunt best,” she told him, “and I am sure she will recognize me better than any other aunts.” Xenia Alexandrovna, she declared, had called her “Astouchka.” “When reminded of this,” she told the baron, “she will have no doubt as to my identity.”
41
Von Kleist wrote to the grand duchess mentioning this assertion, but Xenia Alexandrovna quickly replied that she had never referred to her niece by such a nickname and that the word meant nothing to her.
42
It was even more curious given that Xenia’s sister Olga Alexandrovna had been closest to her nieces and had actually been Anastasia’s godmother. On another occasion, the von Kleists invited their doctor to dinner, but did not introduce him to the claimant; when Gerda von Kleist later asked Fraulein Annie if she recognized him as someone “very important in your life,” the claimant first insisted that he was a stranger, only to admit, “I do know him, of course. I just cannot recall if he is a duke or a prince.”
43

Even more peculiar was Fraulein Annie’s reluctance to speak Russian. “We always tried to get her to speak Russian,” recalled Gerda von Kleist, “but she never would.”
44
At first, Fraulein Annie said that “although I know Russian,” speaking it “awakens in me extremely painful memories. The Russians did so much harm to me and my family.”
45
Her supporters largely accepted this, though soon she also blamed her injuries, saying that her memory was impaired. “If you knew how terrible it is,” she once declared. “Most dreadful of all, I do not find the Russian again. All forgotten.”
46
In June 1922, Fraulein Annie, suffering from both anemia and the early onset of tuberculosis, collapsed. The von Kleists summoned their family physician, T. A. Schiller, who treated the claimant throughout the summer. “In her sleep,” he noted, “she speaks Russian with good pronunciation; mostly inessential things.”
47
It is not known, however, precisely who determined this; it was certainly not Schiller, for on the margin of the report he wrote, “Supposed to have done so.”
48
Then there were reports, all rather unsatisfactory, that during her stay with the von Kleists the claimant had cried out in both Russian and Polish.
49
On the other hand, Fraulein Annie clearly understood Russian; when questioned in the language, she provided correct replies, albeit in German.
50
Because she complained of an inability to concentrate and a damaged memory, the baron took to reading aloud to his guest from the numerous books and magazines with stories about the Romanovs; these were in both Russian and in German. She understood when von Kleist read the Russian texts, but all discussions took place, at her request, in German.
51

Fraulein Annie settled into life at the von Kleist apartment and very soon the family discovered just how apt the warnings from the Dalldorf official had been, for she was a distinctly odd guest. One moment, she might be sitting quietly, staring at her growing collection of photographs and postcards of the Romanovs, or conversing politely, only to suddenly erupt in tears and flee to the security of her bed; attempts at amiability alternated with displays of temper that left the family aghast at her rude manner.
52
Her moods were variable, and she seemed to alternate between aristocratic disdain and curious bursts of distinctly unregal behavior. Gerda von Kleist, who was just sixteen when Fraulein Annie came to live with them, despised the claimant and was convinced that the woman was no grand duchess. She later described her as an ill-mannered young woman completely lacking in any social abilities, “someone without any culture,” she insisted, who had once darted beneath the dining table to wipe her nose.
53

This emotional volatility and rapidly accumulating mass of contradictory evidence resulted in numerous scenes and an increasing tension that traumatized the household and pitted members of the von Kleist family against each other. The baroness always remained an adamant supporter, but the baron, who initially believed that his guest was Anastasia, later backed away from this position, and no one could quite agree if he was hero or villain. “He went to immense trouble to solve the mystery,” one contemporary declared, “and made no secret of his first conviction that the alleged Grand Duchess was genuine. It is, however, true that he may have possessed ulterior motives, as was intimated within the émigré community. Should the old regime ever be restored in Russia, he hoped great benefits would arise from having cared for the young woman.”
54
As for the claimant herself, she later accused the baron of being interested in only two things. The first was the money he thought she could bring him; the second, or so she declared with what always seemed to be her rather prurient interest in such matters, was her body, for she hinted that he had crept into her bedroom one night with an idea to seducing her.
55

Whatever the truth, it took just nine weeks for this tension to erupt. On the morning of Saturday, August 12, 1922, the baroness asked her guest if she would like to go shopping; Fraulein Annie excused herself, saying that she was too tired. Because of her suicide attempt in 1920, the von Kleists had never left the claimant alone, but on this morning the baron was at his office and the daughters were away. Baroness von Kleist reluctantly left the apartment; a few hours later, when she returned, Fraulein Annie was gone.
56

Suspecting that her guest had run off to visit Clara Peuthert, whom the baroness distrusted and had barred from her apartment, the von Kleists alerted the Berlin police, who in turn filed a report on the missing woman.
57
That evening, the von Kleists and detectives arrived at Peuthert’s rather seedy apartment in a building at 1 Schumannstrasse; when questioned, Peuthert professed ignorance, and a thorough search of the premises by the police indeed proved that the claimant was not there.
58
Later, Peuthert would insist, contrary to this, that Fraulein Annie had indeed been with her and had never left her apartment, a demonstrably false assertion, given the police inspection.
59

On August 16, Franz Jaenicke, a friend of Nicholas von Schwabe, discovered the claimant by accident, wandering through the Berlin Zoo in the Tiergarten, and took her back to his apartment.
60
She was adamant that she would not return to the von Kleists, while the baroness, for her part, told Jaenicke that the young woman “was no longer welcome in our home.” The next day, though, Marie von Kleist came to see her. She found Fraulein Annie suddenly, inexplicably overwhelmed when she entered the room. “She was not wearing any of the clothing we had given to her,” the baroness recalled, “and sat in silence in the drawing room; she hung her head and would not say a word.” When the baroness pressed, the claimant collapsed in tears, sobbing, “I feel so dirty! I cannot look you in the eye!”
61
Although the baroness agreed to take her back in, Jaenicke arranged for Fraulein Annie to stay temporarily with his friend Franz Grunberg, an inspector with the Berlin Police Department.

It was the beginning of a restless, peripatetic phase in Fraulein Annie’s life: over the next few years she was passed from one émigré household to another, at times returning briefly to the von Kleists, only to flee to Captain Nicholas von Schwabe and his wife, Alice; to the Berlin apartment of Schwabe’s friend and fellow monarchist Franz Jaenicke; to the dingy flat of Clara Peuthert; or to the protection of Berlin police inspector Franz Grunberg, either at his city apartment or at his country estate at Funkenmühle, near Zossen.
62

She remained very much an enigma, and acceptance or rejection of her claim owed less to evidence than to desire, to the beliefs of those who came to see this damaged young woman who might be their late emperor’s only surviving child. Many of those who opposed her suspected that Fraulein Annie was some sort of pawn, and that a second party must have influenced her and prepared her for this astonishingly difficult role. In the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution and her appearance in Berlin, many simply assumed that she was some kind of Soviet plant, promoted to cause dissention within the émigré community.
63
Others in the émigré community whispered and pointed fingers at each other, believing that some unscrupulous fellow exile was using her to lay claim to a rumored Romanov fortune in European banks. But these ideas were absurd: had either the Soviets or some group of disaffected monarchists wished to pass off a false grand duchess, would they really have selected a candidate as emotionally volatile and uncooperative as Fraulein Annie proved to be? It was one of the most compelling arguments advanced in her favor.

And so she wandered in and out of Berlin, in and out of houses and apartment blocks, drifting through the consciousness of the émigré community as a living specter of their vanished past, living in a faded dream that whispered of hope and unaware of what the future held.

7

A Story of Escape

It was in the safety of the von Kleist apartment that the claimant first revealed what she said was the tale of her rescue from the massacre in Ekaterinburg. She was always reluctant to discuss the subject; when she did so, it was with emotion and what seemed to be obvious distress, as she often burst into tears. “I have passed through everything,” she would say, “dirt and all, everything!”
1
The story came in fragmented form, a few sentences uttered over the weeks and months to her early supporters, principally Baron von Kleist, who, as his wife noted, “carefully wrote down everything she said” during their hours of conversation.
2
Zenaide Tolstoy and Clara Peuthert added details, all of it pieced together in an attempt to provide a cogent narrative.
3
Her supporters excused the often improbable, fragmented, and contradictory narrative as evidence of the trauma they believed she had endured, while her opponents dismissed it as a complete fabrication.

Fraulein Annie offered few details of the time in Ekaterinburg, saying that life in the Ipatiev House had been “Hell itself,” where “the soldiers were like wild animals toward us.”
4
The executions had come quickly and without warning. “When the carnage began,” she told Baron von Kleist, “I hid myself behind the back of my sister Tatiana, who was killed immediately. Then I received some blows and lost consciousness.”
5
To another supporter, however, she was just as adamant in stating, “I can remember that I was standing beside my sister Olga, and sought shelter behind her shoulder.”
6
To Peuthert, she said that she had been wounded in the shooting before she was “beaten to the floor” and finally fainted.
7
A few years later, she added, “I fainted, everything was blue, and I saw stars dancing and had a great rushing in the ears.”
8
She also gave differing accounts of her alleged wounds. “I received some shots and lost consciousness,” she once said.
9
To Peuthert, she declared that she had “received injuries to her hand and behind the ear, then was knocked to the floor, upon which she fainted.”
10
She even insisted that she had been shot “in the neck,” despite the fact that she bore no such wound.
11

When she awoke, the claimant said, she found herself in the care of a soldier named Alexander Tchaikovsky. “I cannot recall,” she told one supporter, “having seen this Tchaikovsky among the soldiers of the guard during the time we were at Ekaterinburg.”
12
A few years later, though, she changed her story. “Many attentions,” she declared, “were shown to me while in Ekaterinburg by one of the young guards.” On numerous occasions, she said, “we talked together and hoped to see each other under different circumstances.”
13
This was the man she identified as Alexander Tchaikovsky. Her rescuer, she said, was apparently Russian, the son of a convict exiled to Siberia, although his family had once belonged to the Polish nobility.
14
He was, she said, “about twenty-six years of age and handsome,” with “black hair.”
15

According to her tale, Tchaikovsky had taken a wounded Anastasia to the home of his family, supposedly situated in a small settlement near Ekaterinburg, where his mother, Maria, sister Veronica, and brother Serge helped care for her and tended to her wounds.
16
When the Ekaterinburg Bolsheviks learned that Anastasia was missing, the claimant said, Tchaikovsky feared capture and, together with his family, took her to Romania by cart. She remembered “Lying on a heap of straw in a wagon. I did not know who the people were that I could hear talking. I only felt that, as the wagon jolted, my head ached terribly, that it was swathed in damp cloths, and that my hair was matted with blood.”
17
New horses and carts were purchased along the route and expenses paid by using the jewelry she said was sewn into her clothing.
18

She could recall almost nothing of her supposed journey across Siberia and the Ukraine to Romania. “I cannot say that I was conscious,” she later offered to explain the enormous gaps in her story; she only spoke of “weeks, perhaps months” in which she lay in the back of a cart, suffering from her injuries. “We came through such lonely districts; we had to rest in forests, and we traveled on many roads. . . . There were times, when we had traveled for too long a period over unfrequented roads, that we had no water, and our provisions ran out. Soft, black bread was placed in my mouth so that I should not starve.”
19
At some point during the journey, she said, she discovered that she was pregnant with Tchaikovsky’s child. “She told me she had been raped,” recalled Gerda von Kleist.
20
The claimant seemed very forgiving of the alleged attack. “A peasant,” she told one supporter, “is a man of a different nature from ours. Often he does not know what he is doing. I do not wish to judge him too harshly, nor think of him with bitterness. He saved me.”
21

Sometime in the autumn of 1918, Fraulein Annie said, the group crossed an unnamed river, possibly the Dniester, and went to Bucharest, taking refuge with a Tchaikovsky relative who worked as a gardener and lived in a small house in the city.
22
“I was ill all the time,” Fraulein Annie declared. “I cannot remember much about it.”
23
The house, she thought, had been near the main train station; it seems to have been Zenaide Tolstoy, hearing this tale, who first suggested that the street might have been called Swienti Voyevoda.
24
The claimant herself apparently never volunteered any street name, saying several times that she could not recall such a minor detail.
25

The uncertain time frame in the rescue tale became critical when the claimant apparently told Baron von Kleist that she had given birth to a son in Bucharest on December 5, 1918.
26
This date was a problem, as it placed conception—even for a premature birth—before the executions in Ekaterinburg. She soon insisted that von Kleist had invented the date and that she had no idea when her child had allegedly been born.
27
Given the fragmented manner in which her tale was pieced together, perhaps the baron was simply mistaken; but the claimant so frequently altered details of her story that it is equally possible that von Kleist correctly recorded her remark. To von Kleist, Peuthert, and a police inspector, she declared that the child had been named Alexei.
28
Later, for inexplicable reasons, she refuted this minor point, claiming that all three had invented the detail and that “the child is called like his father, Alexander.”
29

It was this pregnancy and birth, Fraulein Annie explained, that had prevented her from approaching Nicholas and Alexandra’s first cousin Queen Marie of Romania when the group arrived in Bucharest. “How could I?” she asked. “At first I was very ill, then when I began to get better I was horrified to find that I was going to have a child. How could I present myself in this shameful state to the Queen?”
30
She was forthright in declaring that she had “never wanted” the baby and “had no interest in it,” saying that she had given the baby to Tchaikovsky’s family and “did not care” what became of him.
31

The damage was done. The problems inherent in the story aside, it sent immense shock waves through the Russian émigré community in Berlin. The idea that an alleged Russian grand duchess had been raped by a common soldier—and an apparent Bolshevik, at that—and given birth to an illegitimate child whom she had then abandoned and whose whereabouts were unknown was simply too much for many of her supporters to stomach. Thus Zenaide Tolstoy summed up the position of many when she coldly declared, “A Grand Duchess cannot have a child by a private soldier.”
32

Of one date, Fraulein Annie said she was reasonably certain: according to what she told Baron von Kleist, she had married Alexander Tchaikovsky on January 18, 1919; she first said that she had been married under the name “Anna Romanska,” although she later insisted that she had used “Anastasia Romanova.”
33
It had, she said, been a Catholic ceremony, held in a church in Bucharest whose name she could not recall, and conducted by a priest she did not remember. She had, she admitted, converted to Catholicism during this period, and had her son baptized in this faith before giving him away.
34

At some point, the claimant said, Tchaikovsky supposedly found an unnamed apparatus that she then used to successfully alter the appearance of her mouth and nose; she later dropped this assertion from her story.
35
Although uncertain of most dates, she told Peuthert that she thought that she had lived in Bucharest for nearly two years before her presence was discovered.
36
One day, she said, Alexander Tchaikovsky was attacked in a Bucharest street, shot in some kind of altercation by suspected Bolshevik agents sent to find her, and died three days later, being buried in a Catholic cemetery in the city. Her details were never consistent: to Baron von Kleist, she said he had been killed in August 1919; to Zenaide Tolstoy, however, she claimed it had happened in 1920.
37

Following this, Fraulein Annie declared, she left her son with Tchaikovsky’s family in Bucharest and made her way north.
38
At first she said she had used money gained from the sale of her last remaining piece of jewelry to pay for the journey; later, however, she offered up the unlikely claim that Alexander Tchaikovsky’s brother Serge had gone to Queen Marie of Romania in January 1920, explained her situation, and traded her jewels for a small amount of cash to finance a trip to Germany.
39
According to what she later told a supporter, she had gone from Romania to Hungary, then made her way through Austria, all without any papers or passport, which necessitated secretly crossing borders and dodging customs officials.
40
She claimed variously to have crossed into Germany on foot or aboard a train.
41
Peuthert recalled that the claimant told her she had first gone to Paris in search of a Russian aristocrat, chased by Bolshevik agents along the way, and only later journeyed on to Germany.
42
According to what she told both Zenaide Tolstoy and Baron von Kleist, however, she had traveled directly to Berlin, arriving sometime in the middle of February 1920.
43

According to von Kleist, Fraulein Annie twice stated that she traveled to the German capital alone, although she later claimed that she had been accompanied by Serge Tchaikovsky.
44
Arriving in Berlin, she told Zenaide Tolstoy that she took a room in a small boardinghouse on Friedrichstrasse, close to a train station, but could not recall the name of the establishment, although to others she would later claim to remember nothing of her time in the city.
45
“I intended,” she told Baron von Kleist, “to live hidden for fear of the pursuers, and to earn a living by working.”
46
She had hoped, she would later say, to somehow gain an audience with Princess Irene of Prussia.
47

It was either on that first evening in Berlin or a week later (she insisted upon both as correct) that Fraulein Annie made her suicide attempt.
48
She usually admitted to this, calling it her “greatest folly.”
49
She told one doctor that as she lay alone in her hotel room, the enormity of her hopeless situation overwhelmed her and she feared going to see Princess Irene because then “everyone would know her shame, that she had borne her common rescuer’s child, and that he was somewhere in Romania.” This, she declared, led her to throw herself into the Landwehr Canal.
50
But if Peuthert is to be believed, the claimant told her that soon after arriving in Berlin, she realized she was being followed. One night, she was pulled into a passing car and drugged; those who kidnapped her removed her clothing and dressed her as a worker before pulling alongside the Landwehr Canal and casting her, half conscious, into the water.
51

Such was the rescue tale Fraulein Annie related, a complex tangle of fantastic elements and contradictions that did nothing to advance its credibility. Seemingly implausible, it gained an aura of possibility when, shortly after passing through the émigré community and appearing in print, rumors and assertions emerged that apparently supported the tale. Starting in the late 1920s, the claimant’s supporters marshaled statements and gossip suggesting that Anastasia had survived the massacre. Franz Svoboda, an Austrian prisoner of war in Ekaterinburg at the time of the executions, said that he happened to be passing the Ipatiev House early on the morning of July 17, 1918, when he heard muffled gunshots; running into the courtyard, he “saw a soldier turning over a woman’s body; she screamed, and the soldier struck her on the head with his rifle butt.” Svoboda said that the young woman was not dead and ran for help; along with two unnamed friends, he bundled the injured girl—Anastasia—into a cart and spirited her to a house down the avenue.
52
Another man, Heinrich Kleibenzetl, picked up the tale, later saying that he had seen a wounded Anastasia shortly after the execution, being cared for by his landlady near the Ipatiev House.
53

Then there were stories from those who had been in Siberia, and from Soviet officials, that one or more of the grand duchesses had escaped; according to one man, the rumors “never ceased to circulate” in Ekaterinburg.
54
Several people later alleged that Bolshevik authorities in Ekaterinburg had conducted a house-to-house search, looking for a missing imperial daughter, and told of posters offering a reward for her capture.
55
Arthur Rohse, a lieutenant in the White Russian Army, recalled “special orders” from the military command to prepare “four fully manned and armored railway carriages,” to be sent across Siberia to find and save a rescued grand duchess.
56
In addition to Princess Elena of Serbia, who was shown an early Anastasia claimant by the Bolsheviks in the autumn of 1918, Count Carl Bonde, chief of the Swedish Red Cross in Siberia, recounted how one day in 1918 his private train was “stopped and searched for Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. The Grand Duchess was not aboard the train, however, and no one seemed to know where she had gone.”
57