The Resurrection of the Romanovs (20 page)

What precisely happened when Volkov visited the claimant became, like so much of Frau Tchaikovsky’s case, a matter of some contention. He arrived at St. Mary’s Hospital in Berlin at the beginning of July 1925, but on the first day could only observe the claimant from a distance as she sat in the garden. After closely examining her the following day, though, said Rathlef-Keilmann, he found no resemblance to Anastasia. “The Grand Duchess had a much rounder face,” Volkov declared, “and had a fresher complexion. The features I now see do not remind me of the Grand Duchess.” For her part, Tchaikovsky remained curiously silent; after he left, she insisted that she had recognized him, but could not give his name, saying, “My brain simply will not work.”
49

Volkov did not speak German, and used Russian throughout his visits; although the claimant understood him, and answered his questions, she would do so only in German, with Rathlef-Keilmann serving as translator. Volkov asked if she could name the two attendants who had looked after Tsesarevich Alexei; if she could identify Tatischev as one of Nicholas II’s adjutants; where the grand duchesses had kept their jewelry in the last days of their captivity; and if she recognized photographs of the dowager empress and Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse.
50
Although she accurately answered the elderly man’s inquiries, the claimant soon grew tired of the questioning and, turning to Rathlef-Keilmann, declared that she would make no further effort to prove her identity.
51

Volkov himself left an account of the meeting quite different from that given by Rathlef-Keilmann. He asked the claimant “whether she recognized me.” According to Volkov, “She answered negatively.” He agreed that she had answered some questions correctly but, opposed to Rathlef-Keilmann, also insisted that “to other questions I asked, she gave unsatisfactory answers,” without indicating what these might have been. The end result, he asserted, was negative: “I can affirm in the most categorical manner that Frau Tchaikovsky has nothing in common with Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna. If she has any knowledge of the life of the Imperial Family, she has imbibed it exclusively from books; her knowledge for the rest is quite superficial. One can prove this by the fact that she was not able to cite a single detail outside those which had appeared in the press.”
52

Questions remain over how the visit ended. In a statement made immediately after the visit, Rathlef-Keilmann contended that Volkov had told the claimant, “Don’t cry! Please don’t cry, I don’t want you to cry!”
53
Three years later, though, in her book on the case, she had him confessing dramatically, “Just think of the position I am in! Supposing I were to say that it is she, and others later on maintain that it is not, what would my position be then?”
54
One would expect Rathlef-Keilmann’s first statement to be the most reliable; why, then, would she omit from it the telling words she later ascribed to Volkov? But this is not the only variation: in her book,
Anastasia: The Survivor of Ekaterinburg
, she also claimed that Frau Tchaikovsky had peppered Volkov with questions, mentioning incidents that had greatly impressed the former courtier.
55
These differences, though, remained unknown, hidden in Rathlef-Keilmann’s notes, statements, and papers; instead, the public was left only with her carefully crafted and convincing book, where such discrepancies were nowhere to be found.

After Volkov’s death in 1929, Professor Serge Ostrogorsky, who also had served at the Russian court, asserted that the former groom had not been entirely certain in his denunciation. “On the one hand,” Ostrogorsky wrote, “he denied her identity. On the other, he told me that his interview with the invalid had moved him deeply, that he had been crying, and had kissed her hand, which certainly he would never have done if someone other than the Grand Duchess had been standing before him.” Asked about this discrepancy, Volkov, according to Ostrogorsky, broke down in tears and cried, “It is true, I believe that she is the Grand Duchess, but how can the Grand Duchess speak no Russian?”
56

Pierre Gilliard with Olga and Tatiana on the terrace at Livadia, 1913.

What did this mean? Volkov could have found the meeting an emotional ordeal that, regardless of the claimant’s identity, reawakened painful memories of the Romanovs and of his own perilous time in Siberia. If he was not as favorably inclined as Rathlef-Keilmann suggested, neither did he seem convinced that Frau Tchaikovsky was not the grand duchess, as he later insisted. This ambiguity was confirmed when Volkov returned to Copenhagen and delivered a report that did nothing to clarify the situation. He could not—or would not—confirm or deny that the young woman was Anastasia. And there was more: that summer of 1925, the claimant casually mentioned the word “Schwibes,” a variant of “Schwibzik,” the nickname bestowed on Anastasia by her aunt Olga Alexandrovna.
57
When Olga heard this, she confessed herself “astonished.”
58
She immediately dispatched an urgent letter to former nursemaid Alexandra Tegleva, who in 1919 had married Pierre Gilliard and settled with him in Lausanne after the pair escaped Russia: “I beg you to leave without delay for Berlin with M. Gilliard to meet the unfortunate woman. What if it should
really
be the little one? God knows! And it would be so sinful if she is alone in her misery, if it is true. . . . I pray you, I pray you, leave at the very earliest moment: you better than anyone else in the world can tell us the truth of the story. . . . God help you! I embrace you with all of my heart. If it is really she, telegraph me; I will join you in Berlin.”
59

A luncheon during the Romanov Tercentenary trip down the Volga River in 1913. From left: Count Paul von Benckendorff, Grand Marshal of the Imperial Court; Marie; Tatiana; Anastasia; and Alexandra Tegleva (“Shura,” later Alexandra Gilliard).

This letter alone indicates that Volkov’s report was indecisive enough to require further investigation. Now, at Olga Alexandrovna’s request, the Gilliards traveled to Berlin to meet the claimant. Frau Tchaikovsky was still at St. Mary’s Hospital, seriously ill with a tubercular infection on her left elbow, gaunt, and in so much pain that doctors plied her with a constant stream of morphine.
60
This is how Gilliard found the woman claiming to be his former pupil when he arrived on July 27. He later recalled, “I asked her several questions in German, to which she muttered some vague monosyllabic answers. In the long silences, we studied her face with great attention, but could not find the least resemblance with the one who had been so dear to us. The patient has a long, upturned nose, a very large mouth, and full lips; Grand Duchess Anastasia, on the other hand, possessed a short, straight nose, a small mouth, and thin lips; nor was the shape of the ears consistent, nor the expression, nor the sound of her voice. Aside from the color of the eyes, we found nothing that made us believe that the patient was Grand Duchess Anastasia, and we had the keen impression of being in the presence of a stranger.”
61

The following morning, the couple returned to the hospital and found the claimant more alert. Alexandra Gilliard asked to examine the patient’s feet; seeing that she suffered from
hallux valgus
, as had Anastasia, she told Rathlef-Keilmann of the similarity.
62
When Gilliard attempted to question Tchaikovsky, though, the few answers she gave were evasive. Pointing to his wife, Gilliard asked the patient if she did not recognize her; according to the former tutor, Frau Tchaikovsky stared at the nursemaid for a long time and finally answered in German, “It is my father’s youngest sister,” meaning Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna.
63
Zahle, who was present, apparently agreed that this had indeed happened, as did Rathlef, although she insisted that the claimant had been delirious.
64

The Gilliards met with Rathlef and Zahle at the Danish Legation in Berlin that evening. Although Gilliard would later say that he had found no real reason to suspect that the patient was Anastasia, he described himself as burdened “by the great responsibility” of making any decision after so brief a visit and when the young woman had been unwell.
65
He decided it would be best to return to Berlin at some later date, when the claimant had improved. Before leaving, however, he did ask that she be moved from St. Mary’s Hospital to a private clinic where she would receive better treatment.
66
The next morning, Frau Tchaikovsky was duly transferred to Berlin’s private Mommsen Clinic, where she would remain for the rest of the year.
67

The former tutor and his wife left Berlin without expressing an opinion on the claimant’s identity. Although Gilliard’s initial impressions had been unfavorable, he could not definitely state that the young woman was not Anastasia. Zahle and Rathlef both argued that injuries to her head and face might well have altered her appearance, something Gilliard accepted; he even granted that possible blows to the head might explain her apparent inability to speak Russian. Afraid “of making an irreparable mistake,” he was willing to evaluate her again at a later date.
68
As for Alexandra Gilliard, she was even less certain, overcome, her husband confided, “with hope that perhaps, after all, the invalid was the girl she had loved so much.”
69
Zenaide Tolstoy had recognized the claimant; Baroness Buxhoeveden had rejected her; Princess Irene, too, had been unconvinced, although she may have harbored doubts. Now, neither Volkov nor the Gilliards could offer a definitive verdict. Something had to be done to resolve this dilemma, this living enigma, this open, emotional wound on the hearts of Romanov relatives and Russian émigrés. That task fell to Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna. Her visit that autumn to the young woman in Berlin would become the single most contentious and legendary episode in the claimant’s case.

9

Encounter in Berlin

The youngest sister of Nicholas II, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, had been one of the few Romanovs allowed into the intimate life of the imperial family at Tsarskoye Selo, and had done her best to provide her sheltered nieces with some semblance of a social life beyond the palace walls. World War I, though, brought separation, and she had last seen Anastasia during an hour-long 1916 visit by Nicholas II and his children to Kiev, where Olga had established a hospital. That same year, her unhappy first marriage was annulled and she promptly wed an army officer, Colonel Nicholas Kulikovsky, in a morganatic union that produced two sons. Olga knew that her mother, Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, among many other relatives, disapproved of this second marriage, which left the grand duchess something of a black sheep within the Romanov family. Still, Olga had dutifully followed her mother out of Russia after the Revolution and to Copenhagen, where she, her husband, and their children shared the dowager empress’s roof and were largely dependent on her largesse to survive in this new and uncertain world.

While insisting that none of the Romanovs had been killed in Ekaterinburg, the dowager empress made it clear that she regarded the young woman in Berlin as a fraud.
1
But after the ambiguous meetings with Volkov and the Gilliards, and their inability to offer any clear opinion, Olga Alexandrovna wasn’t at all certain that the claimant was an imposter; distressed by the idea, uncertain of the secondhand stories she heard, and surprised at the young woman’s knowledge, she thought that the only way to resolve the issue was to visit Berlin and see for herself. Word of her intention caused a panic: both her mother and her sister Xenia Alexandrovna first protested and then finally attempted to prevent her trip. “We were all apprehensive,” Xenia recalled, “about the wisdom of her going, but only because we feared it would be used for propaganda purposes by the claimant’s supporters.”
2
It is also possible, given her morganatic marriage, that both the dowager empress and her eldest daughter harbored doubts about Olga Alexandrovna’s own judgment. Olga, though, refused to be put off and, accompanied by her husband, arrived in Berlin on October 27, 1925.

It was the beginning of the most extraordinary and confusing turn in the claimant’s case. What took place—or more precisely, what was said to have taken place—over the three days of Olga Alexandrovna’s visit did more to elevate Frau Tchaikovsky’s story into the realm of mysterious, modern myth than any other single event. Her encounters with the claimant, as well as those of the Gilliards, who had come from Lausanne to join her, would be seized upon by both supporters and opponents, each side marshaling the contrasting evidence and shifting versions to bolster their own absolute convictions. In many ways, the reality of what actually occurred became less important than the perceptions of what it meant, of what lay unsaid, unacknowledged, hidden just beneath the surface of acceptance or rejection.

Word of the impending visit, said Frau Tchaikovsky’s supporters, had been kept from her so that she had no opportunity to prepare for or anticipate her callers.
3
Not so, countered Olga Alexandrovna and Pierre Gilliard. According to the grand duchess, the claimant “had been warned of my visit” and had even been told, “Someone is coming from Denmark,” from which she believed the claimant could easily have guessed her identity.
4
To this point, Gilliard produced a letter from Zahle in which the minister had warned that it had proved “simply impossible” to keep word of the impending visit from the claimant, whose “thoughts are concentrated on this visit and especially on that of you and your wife.”
5

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna.

Pierre Gilliard was the first to call on Frau Tchaikovsky in her room at the Mommsen Clinic in Berlin. He found her thin and ill; she had recently undergone an invasive operation to save her arm from a tubercular infection, and still suffered from a persistent fever and pain that required regular injections of morphine.
6
“I found her sitting in bed, playing with a cat that had been given to her,” he wrote. “She held out her hand to me and I sat down beside her. From this moment on, she looked at me steadily, but I must insist that she said nothing to me, in the course of my visit, which made me suppose that she had recognized me.” He attempted to question her, but to no avail.
7

“Please chat with me a little,” Gilliard said. “Tell me all you know of your earlier life.”

“I don’t know how to chat!” Frau Tchaikovsky suddenly and angrily replied. “I know nothing about which I could chat with you!” Gilliard, perplexed by this turn of events, soon left the room.
8

When Olga Alexandrovna arrived a few hours later, the controversy really began. The claimant later insisted that the grand duchess “immediately recognized me, and treated me in a most familial manner during her repeated visits.”
9
Journalist Bella Cohen, writing for the
New York Times
, insisted that as soon as Olga entered the room Frau Tchaikovsky sat up in her bed and shouted, “Oh, my dear aunt!”
10

This was nonsense: not even Rathlef-Keilmann, always eager to publicize any evidence favorable to the claimant, made such an assertion.

In fact, there seems only to have been extreme caution from all of those present. When Olga entered, Gilliard wrote, the claimant “made none of those spontaneous movements of tenderness that one would have expected from her if she had really been Grand Duchess Anastasia.”
11
“I was deeply moved,” Olga admitted, writing of “a tender feeling” that the claimant inspired in her.
12
But she seemed to be confused—at least initially—by the claimant’s appearance, remarking, said Rathlef-Keilmann, that she looked more like Tatiana than she did Anastasia.
13

Apparently, though, the more she looked at the claimant, the less resemblance Olga could find. “My niece’s features could not possibly have altered out of all recognition. The nose, the mouth, the eyes were all different.”
14

Olga spoke in Russian, and the claimant replied in German; she understood—“with difficulty,” Gilliard said—Russian but “would not speak it.”
15
When Frau Tchaikovsky did speak, Rathlef said, she peppered the grand duchess with questions, asking, “How is Grandmama? How is her heart?”
16

Out came photographs—of palace rooms, of the Crimea, of the Romanovs, of the Tercentenary tour in 1913—and Olga and Gilliard watched to judge her reaction. Frau Tchaikovsky occasionally pointed at figures and identified faces; with other images, though, she evinced no interest or recognition.
17
And then, after this disappointment, an apparent surprise: according to Rathlef-Keilmann, the claimant, after identifying Alexandra Gilliard by the nickname “Shura” she had used with the imperial children, motioned to a bottle of perfume and asked that she moisten her forehead. This, Rathlef-Keilmann said, had been one of Anastasia’s favorite rituals with the nurse, though she offered no evidence to corroborate the point.
18
Gilliard, according to Rathlef-Keilmann, was so moved, so overwhelmed, that he had stumbled from the room, crying, “How horrible! What has happened to Grand Duchess Anastasia? She is a wreck, a complete physical wreck! I want to do everything I can to assist the Grand Duchess.”
19

At the end of the visit, Olga Alexandrovna, according to Zahle, seemed agitated, confused. “I can’t say that’s it her,” she told him, “but I can’t say that she isn’t.”
20
Rathlef-Keilmann, though, portrayed events in a different light. The grand duchess, she insisted, had pulled her aside and whispered, “Our little one and Shura seem very happy to have found one another again. If I had any money, I would do everything for the little one, but I haven’t any and must earn my own pocket money by painting.” And a bit later, Rathlef-Keilmann said, she added, “I am so happy that I came, and I did it even though Mama did not want me to. She was so angry with me when I came. And then my sister wired me from England saying that under no circumstances should I come to see the little one.”
21

Was this recognition on Olga’s part? Rathlef-Keilmann suggested as much. And there was more: Gilliard and his wife, she said, acted as if “they plainly admitted to the possibility” that the claimant was Anastasia; the former tutor, she said, had even “spoken about the patient” as if he were speaking about Anastasia during this visit.
22
And then, of course, there had been, she said, Gilliard’s emotional outburst, “What has happened to Grand Duchess Anastasia?”
23

Later, Gilliard admitted only that both the grand duchess and his wife were “deeply troubled” over “strange revelations” made by the claimant, revelations such as her mention of the word “Schwibs,” suggesting that she possessed intimate knowledge of life within the imperial family. Both women, he said, were consumed with “the pity that this unhappy creature inspired in them and, above all else, the haunting fear that they would commit an irreparable error. For them, these were terrible, anguished days.” But while this anguish played itself out, Gilliard excused himself, disappearing with Olga’s husband, Kulikovsky, to interview several Russian émigrés in Berlin who had been involved with the claimant. He insisted that talks with Captain Nicholas von Schwabe and his wife, Alice, had been “a veritable coup de théâtre.”
24
From the couple, who by now had turned against the claimant, came accusations that she had studied books and magazines about the imperial family; had learned details of court life from her numerous callers; had collected and memorized photographs and postcards—in short, a convenient answer to how Frau Tchaikovsky had come by her knowledge and managed to seem so convincing.
25

And there was more, for von Schwabe explained just how Frau Tchaikovsky had learned the mysterious word “Schwibs” that so perplexed Olga Alexandrovna. Before one of his visits to the patient at Dalldorf, von Schwabe said, a former officer—either Serge Markov or Paul Bulygin (von Schwabe named both in his statement)—had come to him, suggesting that he ask her if she recognized the word; Olga Alexandrovna had given the officer the term, to use as a code if he secretly contacted the imperial family during their Siberian captivity. The man wrote it inside a Bible, which von Schwabe duly presented to the claimant; when confronted with this, though, she seemed confused, and Alice von Schwabe helped her with the pronunciation and explained its significance.
26

As far as Gilliard was concerned, these were the answers he had needed, and Kulikovsky as well, for the latter insisted that his wife meet the Schwabes that evening and listen to their stories.
27
There followed, recalled Olga Alexandrovna, a “horrible dinner” hosted by Zahle at the Danish legation.
28
“Horrible” presumably because the meal quickly devolved into a shouting match between Gilliard and Zahle, the one apparently convinced that he had discovered the solution to the mystery of the claimant’s “strange revelations,” the other just as firmly convinced that she was Anastasia and was about to be abandoned based on what he believed to be lies. Gilliard tried to explain what he had heard, only for Zahle to interrupt him, complaining that the former tutor “had gone beyond the role of neutral observer” to conduct an unnecessary investigation. The conversation became “so violent,” Gilliard later wrote, that the dinner ended quite abruptly, “in great embarrassment for all.”
29

The effect of these stories, these talks with Berlin émigrés, and the traumatic evening at the Danish legation was quite clear the following morning, when the group returned to the Mommsen Clinic for their final visit. The behavior of the Gilliards toward the claimant, Rathlef-Keilmann saw, was “noticeably different.”
30
Everyone seemed tense, on edge; even Frau Tchaikovsky sensed that something had changed, for she “cried and cried,” recalled Olga, “saying that everyone was going to abandon her.”
31

The visits ended on decidedly ambiguous notes. Alexandra Gilliard was in tears. “I used to love her so much, so much!” Rathlef-Keilmann recorded her saying. “Why do I love this girl here so much?”
32
As this was taking place, Gilliard pulled Zahle aside, confiding that neither he nor his wife could find “the slightest resemblance” between the claimant and Anastasia.
33
But then, confusingly, said Rathlef-Keilmann, he departed with the curious remark, “We are going away without being able to say that she is
not
Grand Duchess Anastasia.”
34

Olga Alexandrovna echoed this apparent uncertainly in her parting words to Zahle: “My intelligence,” Rathlef-Keilmann quoted her as saying, “will not allow me to accept her as Anastasia, but my heart tells me that it is she. And since I have grown up in a religion that taught me to follow the dictates of the heart rather than those of the mind, I am unable to leave this unfortunate child.”
35