The Resurrection of the Romanovs (28 page)

Tatiana visited Frau Tchaikovsky at Oberstdorf in August 1926. Baron Vassili Osten-Sacken first had to convince Frau Tchaikovsky to receive her caller, though despite her repeated pleas he refused to reveal her identity; if only she would try to guess, he said, he would tell her the name of her caller. Frau Tchaikovsky refused, and finally Osten-Sacken confided that the young woman’s father had served Nicholas II very closely.
46
On first seeing her from a distance, Tatiana noted “a resemblance to the manner and movements of the eldest Grand Duchesses, Olga and Tatiana Nikolaievna,” but nothing particularly reminiscent of Anastasia in the claimant.
47

The following morning, according to Osten-Sacken, Frau Tchaikovsky seemed agitated, saying that she knew her visitor’s face but could not recall her name. Had Serge Botkin sent her? Apparently it was an innocent question; even Tatiana thought it unremarkable, writing, “As the Baron acted as my uncle’s deputy and I had arrived in his company, it was only natural that she would make such a connection.”
48
But Osten-Sacken was sure Frau Tchaikovsky was dropping broad hints: “You promised to tell me her name if I guessed, and I did not name Botkin in vain,” she told him. “Now who is she?” This was enough for the baron, who broke down and confessed that Dr. Botkin’s daughter Tatiana had come to see her.
49

“When at first I saw her face up close, and particularly her eyes, so blue and filled with light, I immediately recognized Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna,” Tatiana later wrote. “She was much thinner, had aged, and was therefore somewhat changed; the mouth has changed and noticeably coarsened, and owing to her thinness her nose seemed more prominent than before.” In continuing her examination, “I noticed more and more the resemblance.” She was struck by “the height, the form, and the color of her hair,” which reminded her of Anastasia, as well as the same “roguish” appearance when she laughed. Above all, she wrote, “her unforgettable blue-gray eyes had exactly the same look in them as when she was a child.”
50

That afternoon, over tea, Frau Tchaikovsky was showing her visitors some images taken at Lugano when Tatiana said, “I also have photographs” and produced a souvenir album of the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. After a quick glance, the claimant slammed the cover shut, crying, “This I must see alone!” She ran from the room, followed by a worried Tatiana. Then something truly peculiar happened: although Osten-Sacken had already told the claimant her visitor’s name, when Tatiana gently asked, “Do you not know me?” Frau Tchaikovsky insisted that though she recognized the face, she needed to rest before the name would come to her. Unaware of this contradiction, Tatiana later helped her prepare for bed, remarking, “I’ll undress you as my father did when you were ill.”

“Yes, with measles,” Frau Tchaikovsky replied. It was all the confirmation Tatiana needed, for Dr. Botkin had indeed tended to Anastasia when she was ill with measles at the time of the Revolution. “This fact,” Tatiana insisted, “had not been published and apart from my father I was the only one to know of it.”
51
She may have believed this to be true, but Tatiana was wrong. The claimant already owned several books, including the German edition of Gilliard’s memoirs, that recorded Dr. Botkin’s attendance on the grand duchesses during the nights preceding the Revolution; Tchaikovsky had even discussed this fact with Rathlef-Keilmann a year before she met Tatiana.
52

“It is Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna,” Tatiana told Osten-Sacken. “I have recognized her. She is the same person I used to know, only the lower half of her face, her mouth, has changed.”
53

After this encounter, Tatiana dispatched a hasty cable to Olga Alexandrovna in Copenhagen, explaining her recognition and begging the grand duchess to reconsider the issue. To this, however, Olga replied, “We took the matter very seriously, as shown by the visits paid by old Volkov, two visits by M. Gilliard and his wife, and those of myself and my husband. . . . Despite our repeated efforts to try to recognize the patient as either Tatiana or Anastasia, we came away quite convinced of the reverse.”
54

Tatiana’s recognition of Frau Tchaikovsky as Anastasia earned her the lasting wrath of many Russian émigrés. Those who sided with Olga Alexandrovna and other opponents took Tatiana’s acceptance of the claimant as a betrayal of the Romanovs and callously accused her of dishonoring their memory and that of her father. Even her own Uncle Peter once dismissed her identification by insisting that at the time of the meeting his niece had been “suffering from the hallucinations common to a pregnant woman.”
55
Yet despite the social consequences and persistently mean-spirited insinuations against her, Tatiana remained absolutely convinced that Tchaikovsky was Anastasia. Uniquely, in a case often populated with dubious assertions and exaggerated stories, no one—not even the surviving Romanovs—ever accused Tatiana of duplicity or doubted her obvious sincerity.

The same, unfortunately, could not be said of Tatiana’s brother Gleb. It was 1925 or 1926, he recalled, when, working as a journalist in New York, he first saw an article on Frau Tchaikovsky. Her features, he said, “vividly reminded me of a mixture of Grand Duchesses Tatiana and Anastasia.” Even so, he noted that there “had always been many rumors” about the escape of one or another member of the imperial family, and that he had “never paid any attention to them, so certain had I been that they had all perished.”
56
This certainly, though, changed when Tatiana twice wrote to her brother, assuring him that Frau Tchaikovsky was indeed Anastasia.
57
Hoping to clarify this confusing situation, Gleb contacted Gilliard, asking his opinion; the reply, tinged with a bit of hysteria, denounced Frau Tchaikovsky as “a miserable creature” and asserted that the entire affair was “Bolshevik propaganda.”
58
In April 1926, the North American Newspaper Alliance in New York agreed to fund Gleb’s trip to Germany to meet the claimant in exchange for a story about the encounter.
59

Gleb Botkin, about 1930.

When Botkin arrived at Seeon, Frau Tchaikovsky first refused to see him, and he had to content himself with observing her as she passed down a corridor. “I knew the moment I caught sight of Mrs. Tchaikovsky,” Gleb later wrote, “that I was standing before Grand Duchess Anastasia. She was, it is true, changed in body and in features . . . . Her face seemed elongated, and the nose more prominent, perhaps owing to her thinness.” He was particularly struck by “her eyes, which retained their unique, great charm,” adding that “her traits, her voice, inflection, carriage, and certain manners” were all identical to those of Anastasia.
60

Like his sister Tatiana, Gleb honestly admitted that the claimant physically differed from Anastasia in several respects. She was, it is true, the same height, and had the same blue eyes, but he noted his feeling that her face had changed, that her nose was more prominent than that of the grand duchess he had known, and that the shape of her mouth appeared different.
61
Nothing suggests Gleb was not sincerely convinced that Frau Tchaikovsky was Anastasia, but aside from her eyes and her height, he based his recognition on subjective intangibles, including her manner, her carriage, and her voice. Perhaps knowledge that his sister had already done so helped convince Gleb to accept the claimant as genuine.

Throughout, he recalled, Frau Tchaikovsky spoke German, and he alternated in Russian and in German. She understood Russian and, he said, “substituted one Russian word for a German one” when speaking to him.
62
In fact, as Gleb clarified, she had done just that—provided a single Russian word as he was telling a story and forgot the German term for squirrel. “Oh, I know,” the claimant interrupted. “
Belka
is
Eichhörnchen
in German.”
63
Yet from this single Russian word, Gleb concluded that “not only did she have a perfect command of Russian, but she had also preserved that unique accent which I have never heard outside of her own family.”
64
Aside from this single word, though, he admitted, “I do not remember that the Grand Duchess spoke Russian with me or in my presence.”
65

But the most compelling aspect of the encounter once again involved Frau Tchaikovsky’s revelation of startling and intimate information that, her supporters contended, only the real Anastasia would have known. One day, she asked if Gleb had brought “his funny animals.” Everyone but Gleb was puzzled, and he quickly produced a batch of the drawings he had done to illustrate his allegorical stories peopled by animals; some of the images were new, while some dated from his stay in Tobolsk—the same drawings that his father had smuggled into the Governor’s House to amuse Anastasia and Alexei. These the claimant readily identified.
66

Surely this was proof: who but Anastasia would know of the images, or be able to point out which drawings dated to the stay in Tobolsk? Yet the story was not quite as convincing as this account suggests. Contrary to what Gleb wrote in his 1938 book on the case, Frau Tchaikovsky never asked about his “funny animals” or offered any evidence that she was aware of their existence. It was, in fact, Gleb who first raised the issue, as he confirmed on three separate occasions: first to Rathlef-Keilmann, then in his 1931 book on the Romanovs, and finally in his affidavit on the claimant’s case; only later did he change his story.
67
He had mentioned the drawings, he said, “to break the ice,” “to ease the conversation.”
68
It was not, though, really a question of who first raised the subject but rather the claimant’s apparent ability to detect the older images from those done more recently, “the painful feelings that overwhelmed her” on seeing those done in Tobolsk, and her comment “You did them then, in Siberia” that seemed so powerful.
69
It has been suggested that she simply guessed which pictures had been done in Siberia, as “at least some” bore dates at the bottom.
70
This is unlikely, as very few of the drawings were dated.
71
For those who did not believe that Frau Tchaikovsky was Anastasia, though, there was a simpler possibility: that when looking through the drawings the claimant may simply have made some vague comment, a general remark about Siberia, that the impressionable Botkin interpreted in a way most favorable to the idea that she was the grand duchess.

This seems possible, especially given Botkin’s somewhat questionable assertions, willingness to dismiss contrary evidence, and alterations to his stories—facts that did nothing to enhance his reputation with the émigré community. Where his sister Tatiana was merely scorned over the case, Gleb took an overt pride in the numerous enemies he made; he even accused his sister of treachery. To Gleb, everyone who had met and rejected Frau Tchaikovsky as Anastasia was guilty of deceit, of denying a surviving grand duchess her name and identity. His was a mystical rather than a practical nature, and it allowed him to embrace such charges in the service of what he believed was a just cause. He cast himself in the role of champion, and Frau Tchaikovsky never had a more convinced—and ultimately damaging—supporter than the man who believed that in aiding her he was continuing his father’s service to the imperial family.

13

“A Gruesome Impression”

By the beginning of 1928, and after nearly a decade of intrigue, Frau Tchaikovsky’s claim to be Anastasia had grown into a confusing enigma. The previous year, much against the claimant’s wishes, Rathlef-Keilmann published a series of articles on the case: for the first time, the public read of the controversies over recognitions and denunciations, scars and languages, memories and manners. It was a tragic fairy tale come to life, replete with royal intrigue and a compelling air of mystery. In Berlin the claimant’s haunted face stared from newspapers and magazines arguing and analyzing her case; and it was not just Berlin that followed her tale with rapt attention—all of Germany seemed fascinated, along with the rest of Europe and even America.
1

Intrigue seemed inseparable from the story as it continued to develop. Opinions and assertions hardened on both sides amid a constant swell of rumor and conflicting reports. The newspaper headlines chronicling the case were remarkably consistent if only in their inconsistency: one day, they announced that Frau Tchaikovsky had been exposed as a Bolshevik agent; the next, that she had “confessed” to being a Romanian actress; one month, she had been “unmasked” as a Polish factory worker; the next, she was said to be the fiancée of a well-known Baltic gangster.
2
There were threats of lawsuits, retractions, and demands that Frau Tchaikovsky be arrested. Faced with this growing uncertainty, Gleb Botkin thought it best that the claimant leave Europe. A New York socialite named Margharita Derfelden, whose late husband had served in the dowager empress’s personal escort, contacted Botkin after he returned from Seeon; she also was friendly with Princess Xenia Georgievna, the real Anastasia’s second cousin, who lived on Long Island, and eventually arranged a meeting so that Botkin could inform her of the case.
3

Anna Anderson, dressed in her new winter white wardrobe, in America, 1928.

Xenia Georgievna’s uncle Prince Christopher of Greece happened to be present at her Long Island estate Kenwood when Botkin arrived and unraveled his tale of having recognized the claimant as Anastasia. Botkin’s “sincerity,” wrote the prince, “was obvious as he described his visit to her.” After hearing this story, Xenia Georgievna “burst into tears” and suddenly exclaimed, “We must bring her over to America! I will pay all the expenses and she can live with me!”
4
“I thought that if I took her in,” Xenia Georgievna later said of the claimant, “publicity surrounding the case could be avoided. This seemed so simple to me, and I was certain that when I was sure in my own mind I could then approach important members of my family.” Above all, she declared, “I felt if she was separated from people of doubtful intent who were accused of suggesting memories and facts to her that I would be able to obtain a true picture of her personality and identity. If she was indeed an impostor, it would save my family much unpleasantness, and if she really was Anastasia, it was terrible to think that nothing was being done for her.”
5

On Saturday, January 28, 1928, Frau Tchaikovsky left Seeon, armed with an expensive new winter wardrobe in white. “There is a universal feeling of compassion for poor little Princess Xenia,” wrote Faith Lavington, “who has no idea what she has landed herself into.”
6
She traveled to Cherbourg to board the liner
Berengaria
for New York, accompanied by Agnes Gallagher, Scottish nanny to Princess Xenia’s daughter Nancy. During their stop in Paris, Gallagher recalled, the claimant had ordered breakfast for them both, and in French—the first recorded instance that she possessed any familiarity with the language. Gallagher spoke no French herself, so had no idea what Frau Tchaikovsky had actually said, though a waiter duly delivered breakfast to their table. But it was an exception, an aberration, not to be repeated for another three decades; in fact, as Gallagher recalled, she spoke English with the claimant throughout the trip. Not that Frau Tchaikovsky answered in kind, for she continued to speak only German. Eventually, necessity resulted in “increasing fluency”; by the time they reached New York, said Gallagher, Frau Tchaikovsky “was talking English perfectly.”
7

The
Berengaria
steamed into New York Harbor on February 9, greeted by a curious and enthusiastic mob, prying newsreels, exploding flashes from cameras, and the shouted questions of more than fifty reporters who crowded the Thirteenth Street Pier as the liner slowly drew near, all hoping for a glimpse of the young woman who just might be the only surviving daughter of Russia’s last tsar. Chaotic as the scene was, it was somehow entirely fitting to this tangled tale and its relocation to the New World, amid rumors that “Anastasia” would soon be off to Hollywood to star in a motion picture based on her story.
8
Princess Xenia Georgievna was on holiday in the West Indies when the claimant arrived, so Frau Tchaikovsky temporarily stayed as the guest of elderly New York socialite and Standard Oil heiress Annie Burr Jennings at her luxurious apartment on East Seventieth Street, attending cocktail parties and being feted by the city’s elite.
9
New York, with its congested streets and modern skyscrapers, was an entirely new universe, one far removed from the tranquility of Seeon, yet Frau Tchaikovsky found it all fascinating. “For two weeks,” she recalled, “the newspapers talked about me,” an indication that she was soon caught up in the excitement surrounding her visit.
10
The
New York Herald Tribune
rather appropriately summed up the enigmatic nature of the tale by writing, “Historians and enthusiasts produce their mountains of proof; but one never really knows, and one is never quite sure that one would want to.”
11

After a few weeks, Princess Xenia Georgievna returned from holiday and the claimant finally took up residence at Kenwood, her sprawling estate at Oyster Bay on Long Island. Born in 1903, Xenia Georgievna had only occasionally seen Anastasia, most often in the Crimea when they were both children.
12
Along with her mother and elder sister Nina, Xenia left Russia in 1914 to live in England and thus escaped the Revolution; her father, Grand Duke George Mikhailovich, was not as lucky, being executed by the Bolsheviks. In 1921, Xenia wed William Leeds, son of widowed American gilded age socialite Nancy Leeds, who, in a confusing twist, had the previous year married Xenia’s uncle Prince Christopher of Greece.

“Fourteen years had passed since the spring of 1914, when I had last seen Anastasia in the Crimea,” Xenia later said, but she believed herself “competent to distinguish between a member of my own family” and an impostor. Over the next five months, Xenia Georgievna gradually formed an opinion on her guest’s identity, a quest made somewhat difficult by what she termed the claimant’s “frequent agitation, volatile emotions, and changes of mood.” In time, however, she became convinced that Frau Tchaikovsky was Anastasia. “I should not say,” Xenia Georgievna declared, “that even after prolonged exposure, I recognized the claimant visually. My recognition was based on an intuitive impression of a family resemblance, especially to her mother’s relatives. One of the most convincing aspects of her personality was a completely unconscious acceptance of her identity. At all times she was herself, and never gave the impression of acting a role.” According to Xenia, the claimant “never, no matter the pressure, ever made an error that would have shaken my growing conviction and final complete embrace in her identity.”
13

At Frau Tchaikovsky’s request, Xenia Georgievna largely avoided questioning her about her alleged past or recalling incidents in Russia; and yet, rather than discuss innocuous subjects such as courtiers or servants, holidays in the Crimea, or rooms in the imperial palaces, the claimant “many times,” Xenia recalled, raised her supposed survival of the massacre of her family and escape across Siberia, and her alleged time in Bucharest.
14
Perhaps she simply wished to avoid her alleged childhood owing to difficulty in remembering, or to escape the inevitable feeling that she was being scrutinized, but Frau Tchaikovsky’s apparent willingness to relive what would have been the most brutal period in Anastasia’s life was altogether odd.

Yet if this seemed strange, there also were those inexplicable turns, things that suggested—as they had so often in this case—that Frau Tchaikovsky might very well be Anastasia. Xenia had agreed to the claimant’s request not to arrange any confrontations or meetings with relatives, but one day her cousin Prince Dimitri Alexandrovich came to Kenwood to play tennis with a friend. A mesh fence overgrown with vines separated the tennis court from the claimant’s window, so that she could hear the game but not see it being played. As Xenia recalled, Dimitri and his friend were playing, calling out the score and yelling back and forth to each other in English. When Xenia entered the claimant’s room later that day, Frau Tchaikovsky was furious. “You lied to me!” she screamed. “You promised not to bring them here!” When Xenia pressed, the claimant cried, “I know his voice! It’s one of the cousins!”
15

Who but Anastasia, Xenia Georgievna was convinced, could identify some minor Romanov cousin merely by hearing his voice? No one seems to have actually questioned the implicit implication: that a surviving Anastasia possessed such extraordinary recall that she could accurately recognize the voice of a cousin whom she had not seen for more than a decade. Yet a more mundane answer suggested itself to Frau Tchaikovsky’s opponents. Although she couldn’t see the players, the claimant had heard and followed their conversation as they shouted back and forth; it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that names were used that provided Frau Tchaikovsky with the identity of at least one of the men.

And, as usual, there were renewed controversies over languages. Stories asserted that during her stay at Kenwood, Frau Tchaikovsky had occasionally and unintentionally lapsed into Russian. A visiting Margharita Derfelden later recalled that once, when walking through the garden, the claimant had “talked of the flowers in Russian, calling them by their quaint Russian names.”
16
More famously, Xenia Georgievna once supposedly walked into the claimant’s room while the latter was playing at the window with her two pet parakeets. “Look!” Frau Tchaikovsky said in Russian. “They are dancing on the windowsill!” From this, Xenia declared that the claimant spoke “perfectly acceptable Russian from the point of view of St. Petersburg society.”
17

Convincing? As relayed in numerous accounts favorable to Frau Tchaikovsky’s claim, yes; in truth, no. Derfelden did indeed declare that the claimant had spoken of flowers at Kenwood using Russian names; but she—and not Xenia Georgievna—also was the source for the parakeet story. In the early 1970s, Xenia Georgievna’s nephew Prince David Chavchavadze told case historian Brien Horan that he had often heard the parakeet story from his mother, Princess Nina Georgievna, who said that she, in turn, had heard it from Xenia herself. The remark about the quality of the claimant’s spoken Russian also originated with Chavchavadze; the words frequently quoted were thus not those of Xenia Georgievna but, at best, a thirdhand version of what she may have said.
18

Yet even this is problematic. In 1959, Xenia spent two days answering questions about the claimant at the West German consulate in New York. When asked specifically about Frau Tchaikovsky’s languages, she declared, “From the beginning the claimant and myself communicated only in English. Her English accent was good, but she was somewhat out of practice, in that sometimes she could not find the correct expression. However, we never spoke Russian together, despite the fact that one day I said to her, ‘It’s a pity that we don’t speak Russian, our mother tongue.’ The claimant explained on this and other occasions that she did not want to hear Russian.”
19

So Xenia never heard the claimant speak Russian during her stay at Kenwood. Was the parakeet story merely a bit of lore, filtered through the family, until it assumed a veneer of truth? Perhaps it all originated with Derfelden, who told it to Xenia, who told it to Nina, who told it to her son David Chavchavadze; what is clear, though, is that the reality behind the myth wasn’t as compelling as everyone was led to believe. Xenia said that she spoke to Frau Tchaikovsky in English throughout her stay, although as she admitted, while her accent was “excellent,” she occasionally had to search for the right words or expressions. Yet Xenia’s sister Princess Nina Chavchavadze met the claimant and came away with quite a different impression. Frau Tchaikovsky, she was convinced, was not Anastasia, though she believed her to be “a lady of good society.”
20
The claimant’s linguistic skills, though, stunned her: “My God, what English she spoke! I didn’t even have to be told that she was an impostor by the way she spoke English. . . . We all spoke Russian in the family. But I’ve heard her [Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna] speak English. She used to speak English with her mother, and it wasn’t that sort of English, I assure you.”
21