The Resurrection of the Romanovs (21 page)

It was an extraordinary statement, an admission of uncertainty from the grand duchess. And this was reflected, at least initially, in a letter Olga sent to Zahle on leaving Berlin. Referring to the claimant as “our poor little friend,” she declared, “I can’t tell you how fond I got of her—whoever she is. My feeling is that she is not the one she believes—but one can’t
say she
is not as a fact—as there are still many strange and inexplicable facts not cleared up.”
36

And, thought Rathlef-Keilmann, for Zahle and for those who believed the claimant was Anastasia, it was reflected in five short letters Olga Alexandrovna dispatched to Frau Tchaikovsky over the next few months. “I send you all my love,” ran one, “and think of you all the time. It is very sad to go away, knowing that you are ill and suffering and alone. Don’t be afraid. You are not alone now, and we shall not abandon you.”
37
In others, written in Russian, she gave news of her sons and continued to ask after the claimant’s health; all were signed simply “Olga” or “With love, Olga.” With them came a number of small gifts, including a silk shawl; a sweater Olga Alexandrovna had knitted; and, most peculiarly, one of her family photograph albums, containing personal pictures of her brother Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and captioned in her own hand, certainly a curious present for a woman the grand duchess would later claim had been an obvious and complete stranger when they met.
38

The telling remarks recorded during the visit by Rathlef-Keilmann, the fact that neither the Gilliards nor Olga Alexandrovna had openly rejected the claimant, the curious letters and intimate gifts—for Frau Tchaikovsky’s supporters it all suggested impending recognition of her as Anastasia. As late as December 1925, Alexandra Gilliard was writing to Zahle’s wife, “How is the invalid? My long silence might make you think that I have lost interest in her. That is definitely not the case. I think about her very often, and her tragic situation. . . . Tell her, I pray you, that not a day passes but I think of her and send her my most affectionate greetings.”
39

Then, suddenly, without warning, the story took a dramatic turn. On January 16, 1926—ten weeks after the visits to Berlin—the Copenhagen newspaper
National Tidende
carried a story that, while not attributed to the Romanovs, clearly originated with them and carried their blessing. “We can state,” it reported, “with approval from the most authoritative source, that no common identifying characteristics exist between Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, and the lady in Berlin known by the name Tchaikovsky.” For the first time, Olga Alexandrovna’s visit to the claimant was made public. The article declared, rather inaccurately, that “neither she, nor anyone else who had known the Tsar’s youngest daughter, could find the slightest resemblance” between Anastasia and the claimant; pointed how that at first it had been said that the young woman was a surviving Tatiana; curiously asserted that the claimant spoke with “a Bavarian accent”; and ended by describing her as a “sick and highly strung” young woman who “believes in her story.”
40

This had come directly from Olga Alexandrovna, channeled via her mother’s private secretary Prince Dolgoruky to the editor of the paper.
41
Some two months later, Frau Tchaikovsky’s supporters publicly fired back, in a
New York Times
article written by journalist Bella Cohen that was picked up by wire services and printed around the world. Drawing heavily on information from Rathlef-Keilmann, this offered up a sympathetic—and wildly inaccurate—rendering of the October 1925 meetings that left readers in little doubt that Olga Alexandrovna and the Gilliards had indeed recognized the claimant as Anastasia.
42
These two warring narratives, set out before a curious public, cemented a conflict that raged throughout the twentieth century: did the grand duchess and the Gilliards believe that Frau Tchaikovsky was an impostor, as they publicly asserted? Or, as Rathlef-Keilmann and the claimant’s supporters argued, had they recognized her as Anastasia, only to later callously reject her? Seemingly irreconcilable, the opposing views enshrouded Frau Tchaikovsky’s case with an air of intriguing, unfathomable mystery.

Adding to the legend were stories of what one relative termed Olga Alexandrovna’s “anguished indecision,” of how she had been forced to reverse her initial recognition of a woman she knew to be her niece.
43
Olga, said her cousin Princess Margaret of Denmark, had returned to Copenhagen uncertain; in the end, she had rejected the claimant because of “the influence of others.”
44
The “others” here were popularly believed to be the Romanovs in exile, and more specifically Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, and Olga’s husband, Nicholas Kulikovsky. The latter, it was whispered, was anxious not to upset the precarious balance within the Copenhagen household, where he and his family lived dependent on the charity of Marie Feodorovna, who insisted that the claimant had to be a fraud, given her belief that no executions had ever occurred. It was said that the trio all regarded a surviving Anastasia as a stumbling block to their efforts to benefit financially from any tsarist funds discovered in foreign banks; there were allegations that the imperial family turned their backs on a woman they knew to be Anastasia because of her shameful admission of rape and having given birth to a bastard son whose whereabouts were unknown; and then there were assertions that consideration for her mother’s beliefs and fragile health had led Olga to denounce the claimant.
45
To this last point, Tatiana Botkin added a piece of fourthhand information from former courtier Major General Alexander Spiridovich, who told her that after the meeting in Berlin, Olga Alexandrovna had confided to a friend, “Poor Mama! How am I supposed to tell her? It will kill her.”
46

After speaking to King Christian X of Denmark and his wife, Olga’s cousin Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich wrote that “although there are some people who influence her by presenting everything as a story invented after the event, she is very troubled.” He referred to “great pressure” exerted “to stop her from believing in the sick girl’s identity. Although the Grand Duchess bows to this pressure, sending letters stating that she does not believe in the patient, this does not correspond at all with her inner feelings and morally she is suffering greatly because of it.”
47
As to the Gilliards, or so the theories ran, they had gone along with this cruel deception in exchange for either money or in an attempt to curry favor with the remaining Romanovs and their relatives.

These ideas, given life in newspapers, magazines, and books that chronicled Frau Tchaikovsky’s story, became an integral part of the mythology of her case. Yet the mystery is not without a solution, and that solution can be found not in answering the question Was the claimant Anastasia? but rather in the more complex Did Olga Alexandrovna and the Gilliards, as the evidence suggests, ever believe that she might be?

How else, for example, to explain Rathlef-Keilmann’s contention that the Gilliards’ behavior during the visit led her to believe that they “plainly admitted to the possibility” that the claimant was Anastasia? This might be put down more to opinion than to demonstrable evidence, but then there was the former tutor’s startling outburst on his visit, “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.”
48

This is more than suggestive; it is compelling. But is it true? Zahle read Rathlef-Keilmann’s manuscript and said that her version “agrees with my memories and notes.”
49
Yet he contradicted himself. According to the minister, what Gilliard had in fact said was, “Oh, the poor grand duchess,” a remark that he may have meant to indicate Olga Alexandrovna’s difficult position.
50
And then Rathlef-Keilmann added to the confusion because the effusive words she attributed to Gilliard in her book—his reference to the claimant directly as “Grand Duchess Anastasia”—was missing from her earliest statements and letters concerning the visits. In a March 1926 statement, she quoted Gilliard as saying, “It’s terrible, so terrible. I want to do everything I can to help the Grand Duchess.” There was no mention of the name Anastasia here. That addition seemed to first appear in the pages of Rathlef-Keilmann’s 1928 book.
51
The closest she came was an oblique line in an August 1926 letter to Serge Botkin, stating that Gilliard “spoke about the patient as about Grand Duchess Anastasia,” but she recorded no words in which Gilliard had allegedly referred to the claimant directly as “Anastasia.”
52

With Zahle challenging Rathlef-Keilmann’s precise words—and in this case the precise words attributed to Gilliard carried great significance—the only apparent confirmation for her published account was given after the fact by Professor Serge Rudnev, the tubercular specialist treating the claimant. But Rudnev had his own problems: he provided inaccurate descriptions of Frau Tchaikovsky’s wounds that were disputed by every other doctor; he may have insisted—depending on whether one believed Rudnev or Rathlef-Keilmann was telling the truth, for each claimed the other was wrong about the issue—that he had treated Anastasia in 1914; and described a 1914 encounter in Moscow with Anastasia—“on the day war was declared,” he said—when she had been in St. Petersburg with the imperial family.
53
In fact, as Gilliard recalled, Rudnev had not even been present when the conversation supposedly occurred; Frau Tchaikovsky’s supporters who insisted that Gilliard was lying might have dismissed this but for one inconvenient fact: Gilliard first described the doctor’s absence during the visit in the summer of 1926, before Rathlef-Keilmann had published a single line about the encounter and before the former tutor presumably knew of the need to challenge the professor’s veracity.
54

But in arguments over what was said—or supposedly said—one curiosity was lost, a curiosity that should have raised serious questions about Rathlef-Keilmann’s version of events. According to her, Gilliard had gone through his first and second meetings with the claimant at St. Mary’s Hospital in July 1925 without expressing an opinion on her identity; in October he had spent a morning at her bedside in the Mommsen Clinic, again without revealing anything. Then, suddenly, as he left the room, said Rathlef-Keilmann, he had been overcome—inexplicably—by some epiphany in which he adamantly recognized the claimant as Anastasia. And it had come without any discernible change, any intriguing revelation—bursting from the former tutor as if he had just encountered a ghost from the past for the first time. Rathlef-Keilmann never bothered to address what supposedly prompted this alleged and extraordinary outburst, rendering her account even more unlikely.

When Gilliard first heard Rathlef-Keilmann’s claims he was furious, insisting that he had never referred to Frau Tchaikovsky as “Her Imperial Highness” or as “Grand Duchess Anastasia.” Such claims by Rathlef-Keilmann, he wrote, were “knowingly false,” calling them “words never uttered” but used “to create with readers the impression that I had been convinced and later changed my declaration.”
55
Gilliard seemed to be on solid ground, given that even Zahle disputed the words Rathlef-Keilmann recounted, but the former tutor published a January 1926 letter in which Rathlef-Keilmann had assured him that any assertion he “had recognized the patient as the Grand Duchess is certainly untrue.”
56
Gilliard later burned the letter—along with the rest of his files on the case, including evidence he had amassed against her—after a 1957 court ruling against the claimant, when he assumed they would no longer be needed.
57
The entire affair, including numerous public accusations from Rathlef-Keilmann and others that they had lied about recognizing the claimant, he explained, had been so painful that when the 1957 ruling came, he wanted nothing to remind him of Frau Tchaikovsky.
58
But since the letter no longer existed, some of Frau Tchaikovsky’s supporters either ignored it or suggested, without evidence, that Gilliard was simply lying.
59
But tellingly, Rathlef-Keilmann never challenged the letter’s 1929 publication, its attribution to her, nor its authenticity, suggesting that she had indeed written the damaging message.

Even Rathlef-Keilmann inadvertently offered evidence that undermined her contention that the Gilliards had recognized the claimant as Anastasia. On the last morning of the visit, as she noted, both had been “noticeably different” in their behavior toward the patient than on previous days; surely this change coincided with stories told by the von Schwabes and others asserting that Frau Tchaikovsky had acquired her knowledge of the Romanovs from books, photographs, and meetings with émigrés, which for the visitors apparently helped explain away some of the more troubling questions over her claim. That last morning, Gilliard had even told Zahle that he and his wife could not find “the slightest resemblance” between the claimant and Anastasia. But then, what of his parting words—“We are going away without being able to say that she is
not
Grand Duchess Anastasia”—which indicated uncertainty? It is likely that they stemmed not from confusion but rather from deference to Olga Alexandrovna; it was not that the Gilliards were unable to take a position on whether the claimant was Anastasia, but that they felt they could offer no opinion before the grand duchess did so, as the former tutor confided to one émigré that December of 1925: despite his “firm conviction that she is not Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna, I have not been authorized to make any official declaration.”
60
Less than a week later, Alexandra Gilliard echoed this caution in a letter to the Danish legation in Berlin, asking, “Have they made a decision about her in Copenhagen? What are they going to do?”
61