The Resurrection of the Romanovs (23 page)

At the time, Olga was working with writer Ian Vorres on her memoirs; like her deposition, these were reshaped to eliminate any hint of uncertainty about the claimant’s identity and included assertions and incidents at variance with other evidence. When her memoirs finally appeared in 1964, four years after her death, they represented less a factual accounting of the grand duchess’s experiences than they did efforts to minimize her own initial doubts. Thus she insisted that on entering the patient’s room, the claimant had said in German, “
Ist das die Tante?
” (Is this the aunt?). “That,” Olga said, “at once took me aback.”
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No one else present, not even Gilliard, mentioned any such remark, and had it occurred, surely the former tutor would have included it as damning evidence against Frau Tchaikovsky. She insisted that the claimant “did not seem to understand a word of Russian,” although just five weeks after the encounter she had written to Anatole Mordvinov quite the opposite, saying, “She appears to understand Russian, but would only answer in German.”
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Then there was her adamant statement, “As soon as I had sat down by the bed in the Mommsen Nursing Home, I knew I was looking at a stranger. The spiritual bond between my dear Anastasia and myself was so strong that neither time nor any ghastly experience could have interfered with it. I don’t really know what name to give to that feeling—but I do know it was wholly absent.”
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Clearly, though, Frau Tchaikovsky bore some minimal resemblance to Anastasia, or acquitted herself well enough, or seemed to know perplexingly intimate details about the Romanovs that Olga—like Volkov and the Gilliards—could not immediately and automatically dismiss. She needed further visits, further evidence, before she could satisfy herself that the claimant was not her niece. Had the grand duchess really been confronted with so obvious a fake as she later insisted, why did she then return to her bedside for two further, extended visits? Faced with such objections, Olga’s son Tikhon asserted that his mother “saw immediately” that the claimant was not Anastasia “and was ready to go home,” but had remained in Berlin out of pity, “tricked because of her unusually kind heart.” Zahle, he asserted, had “insisted” that Olga Alexandrovna remain “just a few days more, because the poor sick woman was anticipating the meeting for a long time; it would be cruel to just disappear.”
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But not everything could be blamed on Zahle. As much as she later refused to admit it, Olga Alexandrovna had harbored—even if only for a day or two—uncertainty over the identity of the young woman claiming to be her niece. By concealing this temporary doubt, the grand duchess added fuel to the conspiratorial fires that enveloped the claimant’s case. In the adamant denials of her own history, she unwittingly fed the intrigue that transformed Frau Tchaikovsky into a living legend.

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“If the Imperial House of Russia Wants to Let One of Its Own Die in the Gutter . . .”

Anastasia Tchaikovsky floated through these momentous months, largely unaware of the increasing intrigue surrounding her claim and still hopeful that fate would turn in her favor. She seemed curiously detached from her claim, uninterested in attempts to prove that she was the youngest daughter of Nicholas II. “She does not want, and is not striving for, recognition,” wrote Serge Botkin’s deputy Baron Osten-Sacken in 1926. “Nobody could give her back her peace of mind, in any event; the mental anguish is so unbearable. . . . She wants under no circumstances to return to Russia, and then she doesn’t understand either why it is necessary to establish her identity, which even her near relations are contesting.”
1

It was one of the hallmarks of Tchaikovsky’s claim, and most curious behavior for someone condemned by her opponents as a fraud. Wouldn’t any impostors, almost by definition, seek to prove their alleged identity? Wouldn’t they cooperate in attempts to win recognition? Even Tchaikovsky’s most vociferous critics acknowledged that she was different, that she confounded expectations, and that her disinterest alone invested her claim with an aura of plausibility. She would meet with those who came to see her, but she never sought them out; she would often freely and spontaneously speak of her alleged past, but when pressed by others to do so she usually refused; the nonchalance with which she treated the most serious of issues, as if it was all beneath her, all too humiliating and painful, simply elevated her to a mythic realm no other royal claimant ever entered. But while she remained unwell and isolated in her bed, a storm was building outside the Mommsen Clinic.

The January 1926 article in Copenhagen’s
National Tidende
denouncing Frau Tchaikovsky and the realization that Olga Alexandrovna and the Gilliards had rejected her shocked the claimant’s supporters in Berlin. Zahle immediately returned to Denmark and attempted to intercede with Olga Alexandrovna; he was, she confided to Gilliard, “more convinced than ever” that the claimant was Anastasia.
2
She now blamed Zahle for all the intrigue, “the author of this present, complete chaos. No one asked him to meddle in this affair and to cause such a furor. He’s stubborn and imagines that he has found a protégé, that she will make him famous, that his name is now linked with a quite extraordinary bit of history.”
3

Olga Alexandrovna found a sympathetic ally in Gilliard. “I am persuaded,” he wrote, “that M. Zahle undertook this investigation impelled by the most honorable sentiments. But instead of keeping to a serious examination of the evidence, he let himself be fooled by appearances. He threw himself body and soul into this adventure, and has tried to move heaven and earth when he faced obstacles. Before our second visit to Berlin he had already gone and agitated the entire Danish Court and asked the advice of the Danish and German Foreign Ministries. . . . And because he did not see his error in time, his position has been completely compromised. Events of the last few months have convinced me that M. Zahle is determined to prove that he is not mistaken; already, he imagines himself to be in jeopardy. To save himself, the patient in Berlin
must
be Anastasia.”
4

Influenced by Rathlef-Keilmann, Zahle, in turn, made no secret of his belief that Olga Alexandrovna and Pierre Gilliard had knowingly turned their backs on a surviving Anastasia. While he was circumspect in referring to the grand duchess, he had no such hesitation when discussing the former tutor, asserting flatly that Gilliard’s version of events in Berlin was inconsistent with fact.
5
After Olga’s rejection at the beginning of 1926, King Christian X abruptly terminated Zahle’s investigation. Fearing that he might be constrained from further involvement by Copenhagen, Zahle drew up a list of theoretical questions concerning his knowledge of the case that were written so as to answer themselves. Although the persistent mythology of Tchaikovsky’s case painted them as telling, there was nothing particularly revelatory in the list: Zahle suggested that during the October 1925 visit neither Olga Alexandrovna nor the Gilliards had explicitly declared that the claimant was not Anastasia; that Nicholas and Alice von Schwabe had negatively influenced the trio against the claimant; that von Schwabe and Gilliard had been in communication with representatives of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse; that Zahle believed the grand duchess had “given the appearance” of having recognized the claimant, only to later reject her; that Gilliard had dismissed his uncertainty in an effort to “secure the approbation of the surviving members of the Romanov Family”; that the claimant had clearly understood Russian when it was spoken but had answered in German; and that Tchaikovsky suggested Baroness Buxhoeveden had betrayed the imperial family in Siberia and had rejected her because she feared exposure.
6

Zahle is said to have summed up his eventual position on the claimant in a comment made to her supporter Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg: “All I want is that my Royal House of Denmark be blameless in the eyes of history in this affair. If the Imperial House of Russia wants to let one of its own die in the gutter, then we can do nothing.”
7
By 1927, he had apparently come to believe that Rathlef-Keilmann had used him and abused his trust by distorting evidence in the case. In January of that year, he spent several days in Darmstadt with Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig, arguing evidence and details in the case. “We had hard discussions,” wrote Ernst Ludwig, “because he arrived with the idea that we knew hardly anything, and would follow his advice. But slowly I got him round for we were able to show him that he had also been lied to.” The grand duke allowed Zahle to read his own files on the claimant, files that included voluminous correspondence with Rathlef-Keilmann as well as his detailed replies to her queries, and to compare them against what Rathlef-Keilmann had told the minister. This revealed numerous instances where Rathlef-Keilmann had either withheld information or had edited the grand duke’s replies to make it appear as if he was lying about the facts in the case. Zahle, Ernst Ludwig wrote, “was very much taken aback at this,” convinced as he had been that Rathlef-Keilmann was completely honest and had provided him with nothing but accurate information. “He wants to get out of this affair now, as he is sick of it,” the grand duke recorded. By the end of the visit, Zahle told Ernst Ludwig that he “sees that he has been lied to” and that he wanted to quietly excuse himself from further involvement with Rathlef-Keilmann, though he asked the grand duke not to reveal this decision.
8

True to his word, Zahle began to extricate himself from Rathlef-Keilmann’s circle, though not from the claimant, with whom he remained friendly and in whose asserted identity he continued to believe. After meeting with Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig, said Serge Botkin, for the first time he detected in Zahle “a note of doubt” about Frau Tchaikovsky’s identity, as if “he knew something, but he would not tell me what.”
9
By this time, though, the damage had largely been done. Zahle and Serge Botkin had worked closely with Rathlef-Keilmann to advance the case, and Rathlef-Keilmann was now the accepted authority on Frau Tchaikovsky, the person who cared for her and arranged her life, who granted access and kept the suspicious at bay, who recorded her memories and publicized her case. By 1926, she had a new protégé: Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, first cousin to Nicholas II and Olga Alexandrovna and a graduate of St. Petersburg’s Alexandrovsky Military Judicial Academy. Andrei had followed the case with interest, and began his own investigation into Frau Tchaikovsky’s claim, hoping, he said, “to establish the truth, no matter what it may be,” based on an analysis of “all materials, whether favorable or otherwise.”
10
The dowager empress and Olga Alexandrovna, reported Zahle, had “authorized” the grand duke “to represent them in this matter.”
11
Zahle was wrong. “Rumors reached me,” Andrei admitted to Serge Botkin, “indicating that Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna and Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna were against this inquiry, and that efforts to resolve the situation would be met with disapproval from that quarter.”
12
After he explained his interest, Olga told her cousin that while she did not believe the young woman was Anastasia, neither her mother nor herself “could forbid” his private inquiry.
13

Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich, Andrei’s elder brother and the rightful heir to the former Russian throne, was firmly against this investigation. In the highly uncertain and politically charged émigré universe, the brothers often battled over Andrei’s alliances with questionable parties and his tendency to gravitate to intrigue; Andrei, said one official, was too “easily influenced.”
14
For the moment, though, Kirill did nothing, and Andrei launched his inquiry. With so many conflicting claims and the pervasive swell of rumor, Frau Tchaikovsky’s claim carried just enough evidence to endow it with an aura of plausibility, but it was already becoming a morass of contradictions, and Andrei’s involvement did nothing to clarify matters. Most of his information on the case came from Zahle, who had received it from Rathlef-Keilmann herself, and it was this evidence—much of it of questionable integrity and almost all of it favorable to the claimant—that Andrei examined. Thus he came to believe that his cousin Olga and the Gilliards were lying about the encounters in Berlin, accepting Rathlef-Keilmann’s contention that they had recognized the claimant as Anastasia.

Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich.

Not surprisingly, when Gilliard learned of the grand duke’s investigation he began to flood him with letters, warning that he was being used and was relying on prejudiced materials. By this time, the former tutor had become Rathlef-Keilmann’s dedicated enemy and Frau Tchaikovsky’s most vociferous critic; in the fall of 1925, he had begun actively working with Count Kuno von Hardenberg, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig’s former marshal of the court, in collecting evidence against the claimant. Soon enough, Gilliard was pompously calling himself “the Representative of the Grand Duke of Hesse.”
15
Now, with all the fervor of a religious crusade, Gilliard attempted to persuade Andrei to drop the matter; when the grand duke swept aside the former tutor’s objections, Gilliard dropped any pretense of being polite. As the grand duke confided, Gilliard “wrote me a letter so impertinent that I decided it was best not to answer him. In the end he has unmasked himself as a petty man who is capable of lying.”
16
Gilliard, in turn, eagerly believed the worst of the grand duke. He openly accused Andrei Vladimirovich of “collecting and believing documents, many of Bolshevik origin,” supporting the claimant, and of ignoring evidence against her case.
17
What these alleged Bolshevik documents were, or what they said, Gilliard never explained, and there is no proof that they ever existed. But Gilliard’s rather too heated advocacy destroyed any hope that the stubborn grand duke would prove receptive to his version of events, for soon he was writing, “I must note with regret that all that Gilliard has written about the Berlin meeting is quite far from the truth.”
18

Adamant and erroneous assertions from those on both sides of the case flew about in these years, creating a tangled web of claims and counterclaims that shrouded Frau Tchaikovsky in a growing legend, but the young woman at the center of the storm remained aloof from the intrigues. By the spring of 1926, as an increasingly large universe of interested parties battled each other over her identity, she had finally, after nearly two years of constant hospitalization, sufficiently recovered to be discharged from the Mommsen Clinic. She had nowhere to go, however, and Zahle finally arranged for her, accompanied by Rathlef-Keilmann, to travel to the Swiss resort of Lugano. Their extended stay at the Hotel Tivoli was a holiday paid for by Prince Waldemar of Denmark, who, despite his niece Olga Alexandrovna’s negative opinion of the claimant, was still willing to ensure the mysterious young woman’s well-being.
19
Her supporters thought that this reflected continued uncertainty over her identity; it may, though, have been yet another attempt—like the letters and gifts from Olga Alexandrovna—to control the claimant. As long as some Romanov relative was tending to her financial needs, the expectation may well have been that she would remain isolated and that Rathlef-Keilmann, about whom rumors of publishing contracts constantly swirled, would remain silent.

At first, things went well, but soon enough Frau Tchaikovsky’s volatile and difficult temperament surfaced. She was depressed, “completely embittered,” said Rathlef-Keilmann, “and she distrusted everybody, even those who were good and kind to her. This may be partly explained by the fact that she was completely without any understanding of human nature. She believed most in those who constantly flattered her and were servile towards her.”
20
Frustrated and angry, she increasingly lashed out at Rathlef-Keilmann, blaming her for every misfortune; by the third week of June, after endless days of abuse, Rathlef-Keilmann had had enough, and returned to Berlin. “She’s either crazy or truly wicked,” she declared of the claimant.
21
But Frau Tchaikovsky could not be left alone; she was not responsible enough to care for herself, and Serge Botkin dispatched his assistant Baron Vassili Osten-Sacken to Lugano to make other arrangements for her. The baron’s solution was to have the claimant admitted to the Stillachhaus Sanatorium at Oberstdorf in the Bavarian Alps.
22
Complaining that this was an “attempt to lock her up in an insane asylum” but with nowhere else to go, she reluctantly entered the clinic on June 25, 1926; here she would remain until the spring of 1927.
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