The Resurrection of the Romanovs (30 page)

Gleb Botkin took this statement as a declaration of war, a “revolting” gesture “without provocation” that, he declared, left him “disgusted.”
45
In response, apparently unbidden and without consulting anyone, Gleb very publicly struck back. To Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna he wrote:

Twenty-four-hours did not pass after the death of your mother . . . when you hastened to take another step in the conspiracy against your own niece. . . . It makes a gruesome impression that even at your mother’s deathbed your foremost worry must have been the desire to defraud your niece, and it is appalling that you did not have even the common decency of waiting if only a few days before resuming your ignoble fight. . . . The manner in which your statement was published is obviously calculated to mislead the public. . . . The statement is accompanied by the usual absurd lies so characteristic of the whole campaign of vile slander which you are leading against your unfortunate niece. . . . But permit me for the moment to disregard that malicious nonsense and come down to facts well known to you. These facts in short are that there exists a considerable fortune in both money and real estate belonging to the late Emperor and his heirs, including personal funds of Grand Duchess Anastasia, all of which should now rightfully belong to her; that you are trying for years by fraudulent methods to gain possession of that fortune; that much of the information concerning the Emperor’s fortune came into your possession only after it had been disclosed by Grand Duchess Anastasia; that your sister Grand Duchess Olga practically acknowledged Grand Duchess Anastasia in 1925 upon the assurance of physicians that she could not live longer than for one month; and finally, that as soon as Grand Duchess Anastasia began to recover and you could no longer hope for her immediate death, you and your sister began to denounce her as an imposter. . . . I refuse to believe that you are actually convinced that Mrs. Tchaikovsky is not Grand Duchess Anastasia. You know very well that she remembers the slightest details of her childhood, that she possesses all her physical signs including birth marks, that her handwriting is at present the same as it had been in her youth. . . . You also know that she has been fully acknowledged by many people of unquestionable truthfulness who had known her in her childhood, as well as by several members of the Russian Imperial Family. You further know that all physicians who had ever treated her unanimously agree that it would be a scientific impossibility for her to be anybody but who she claims to be. Finally, you know that all the so-called evidence pretending to disprove her identity consists of nothing but fabrications, falsifications, perjured statements of bribed witnesses and malicious and stupid fiction. . . . That you personally are convinced of the real identity of Grand Duke Anastasia Nikolaievna is evident enough from the fact that in the course of your whole fight against her you have never made a truthful statement nor mentioned a single fact, but resort exclusively to the vilest slander and most preposterous lies. Before the wrong that Your Imperial Highness is committing, even the gruesome murder of the Emperor, his family, and my father by the Bolsheviks pales! It is easier to understand a crime committed by a gang of crazed and drunken savages than the calm, systematic, endless persecution of one of your own family . . . Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaievna, whose only fault is that, being the only rightful heir to the late Emperor, she stands in the way of her greedy and unscrupulous relatives.
46

This, Botkin insisted, had been a carefully considered response, intentionally designed to “make it a grave libel if untrue.” If left unanswered, he asserted, American authorities would inevitably accept the Copenhagen statement as evidence that the claimant was a fraud. By deliberately provoking Xenia Alexandrovna, he said, he hoped that she would threaten legal action against the claimant and thus force a courtroom confrontation that would turn on the evidence supporting her identity. And yet Gleb admitted that he found it “impossible to restrain myself” when writing the letter, and that in composing it he had “poured all the indignation and bitterness” over what he apparently believed to be a callous rejection of a surviving Anastasia by members of her own family.
47

Intentions aside, Botkin’s actions caused irreparable harm. Not only did he send his insulting letter to Xenia Alexandrovna but he also compounded the damage by releasing it to the media, who, quick to grasp the sensational story, published it in full in newspapers around the world. Even Gleb’s sister Tatiana was horrified. Although she described the move as typical of her brother’s “impulsive manner,” his “miserable letter,” Tatiana thought, now “made it impossible for the Romanovs to recognize Anastasia.”
48
Exasperated by such behavior and deeply suspicious of Fallows and his Grandanor Corporation, Tatiana said that she would no longer support her brother or his actions. To this, Gleb responded in typical fashion, openly accusing his sister of deceit.
49
He even suggested that she, too, was part of what he termed a “truly medieval cabal” set on depriving the claimant of her rightful name and inheritance.
50
He publicly denounced Grand Duchesses Xenia and Olga Alexandrovna as “monsters” who, along with Gilliard, “decided to ruin” a woman they knew to be “their own niece” so they could steal her inheritance.
51
And yet Gleb professed amazement that he had been “deserted by all my relatives and friends in Europe, and do not expect to hear from any of them again until the day of Anastasia’s final rehabilitation.”
52

Anderson, for her part, avoided these intrigues, this storm created on her behalf by the well-intentioned, ever loyal, and hopelessly reckless Gleb Botkin. She left the Garden City Hotel at the beginning of 1929 and returned to Annie Burr Jennings, throwing herself into the soirees, teas, and dinners her hostess staged to show her off to New York society.
53
Soon, though, and despite the expensive new clothes her hostess provided, Anderson grew weary of the spectacle. She was quite willing to sleep in her hostess’s bed, explore the city in her hostess’s chauffeur-driven limousine, shop along Fifth Avenue using her hostess’s credit accounts, and eat the food prepared by her hostess’s chef, but her dislike of strangers and of being put on display led to the familiar pattern of sudden outbursts, displays of temper, changes of mood, and wild accusations. Increasingly paranoid, she began to complain that people were spying on her; that the telephone lines were bugged; and that Jennings was alternately keeping her a prisoner or was attempting to steal her inheritance.
54

The situation came to a head in the summer of 1930. On the evening of July 14, Anderson accidentally stepped on and killed one of the two pet parakeets that Xenia Georgievna had given her; she spent the entire night alternately sobbing and then screaming, mourning the loss of her pet, then demanding another. No one in the Jennings apartment slept that night, and no one knew quite what to expect when morning came. Mercurial as ever, Anderson left the apartment, having decided that the best way to overcome her grief was to spend more of her hostess’s money, but when she attempted to charge a new purchase, she learned that Jennings had that morning cut off her guest’s credit. Infuriated, Anderson returned to the apartment and to another storm, continuing the screams and accusations of the previous night; after attempting to physically attack the servants, she was chased, naked, onto the roof, only to be dragged screaming back into the apartment.
55

Something had to be done; over the next few days, Anderson stood in the middle of a crowded department store, shouting abuse and accusations in her broken English at Jennings; sat at the window of her hostess’s apartment, tossing busts and objets d’art at unsuspecting pedestrians below; threatened the servants with physical violence; and declared that she intended to kill herself.
56
Although Anderson was no stranger to depression and unpredictable moods, her behavior in New York was outrageous even for her, and signaled a serious nervous breakdown. Using her money and connections, Jennings found three doctors who, without benefit of examination or even a face-to-face meeting, were willing, for a fee of $1,250 (approximately $64,000 in 2011), to declare that the claimant was delusional and required hospitalization. Armed with the necessary medical opinions, Jennings had a New York Supreme Court judge sign commitment papers declaring that the claimant was suffering from a persecution complex and was “dangerous to herself and others,” and on the night of July 24, a nurse and two orderlies manhandled Anderson out of the Jennings apartment and into a car that took her off to the posh Four Winds Rest Home in Katonah, New York, where she would remain—at Jennings’s expense—for more than a year.
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14

A Tale of Two Books

Anastasia Tchaikovsky, Anna Anderson, had disappeared, secluded somewhere behind the walls of the Four Winds Rest Home, but the world outside remained fascinated, unconcerned that the heroine in their tale had been locked away against her will in an asylum. Opinions hardened in these years: to some she remained a mystery, but as she slipped into obscurity, supporters and opponents alike had embraced their beliefs with a religious certainty. And foremost among those who laid claim to the truth, who revealed and publicized the warring elements and conflicting evidence, were two diametrically opposed actors in her drama, two equally insistent, adamant voices: Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann and Pierre Gilliard. It was no accident that this pair, dogmatic and determined, each despising the other and freely hurling accusations of deceit, took their battle public, onto the pages of newspapers and between the covers of two rival books that chronicled Anderson’s case and cemented her reputation as a living legend.

The Romanovs, so Rathlef-Keilmann believed, fired the first shot in this public relations war when in January 1926 Olga Alexandrovna allowed Copenhagen’s
National Tidende
to publish word of her visit to and rejection of the claimant. Rathlef-Keilmann’s reply came some two months later, in the form of journalist Bella Cohen’s article in the
New York Times
—two diametrically opposing versions of Anderson’s case that only confused the issue of her identity. Everyone feared Rathlef-Keilmann’s voluminous dossier on the claimant, not so much for its content but rather for what she might do with it: there had been constant rumors since the October 1925 visits that she was actively seeking a publisher for a manuscript on the case, a book no one on either side of the argument wanted to see published. Even the claimant herself had warned Rathlef-Keilmann not to publicize the story. Supporters and opponents alike begged her not to take the issue to the press, knowing that such actions would result in the airing of ugly accusations and bring angry recriminations. But no amount of pleading could dissuade Rathlef-Keilmann, and in February 1927 the newspaper
Berliner Nachtausgabe
began her series on the case, a string of articles all overtly favorable to the claimant and highly critical of those who had denounced her.

This burst of publicity, with its insinuations of nefarious royal goings-on, did not go unnoticed. Barely two weeks passed before Ernst Ludwig’s former court marshal Count Kuno von Hardenberg, working with Gilliard, issued a rebuttal. On March 7, the
Königsberg Allgemeine Zeitung
published a thorough, if often inaccurate, story essentially penned by Darmstadt: “The mystery of the false daughter of the Tsar, which has lately generated much talk in the press, seems now to be nearing resolution, as it is now definitely established that ‘Fraulein Unbekannt’ who, on February 22 [sic] of 1920 was pulled from the Landwehr Canal beneath the Bendler Bridge by Berlin police is not one of the Tsar’s daughters. A long list of confrontations, inquiries, and careful examination of statements made by the alleged Grand Duchess Anastasia has finally resulted in this conclusion.” The statement spoke mysteriously of an “anthropological comparison of the ears of Frau Tchaikovsky and Grand Duchess Anastasia” that revealed discrepancies, and asserted, quite erroneously, that “the deformities of the feet recalled by all of those who had known Grand Duchess Anastasia are not found in the claimant.” Only those who had not known the real Anastasia thought that the claimant bore “a striking resemblance” to the grand duchess. “The closest relatives of the Tsar’s family, as well as the tutor Gilliard and his wife, and the lady of the court Baroness Buxhoeveden all absolutely deny this alleged resemblance. Nor was Frau Tchaikovsky able to recognize Grand Duchess Anastasia’s relatives and acquaintances when they visited her. Medical examination has revealed, contrary to assertions, that blows from a rifle butt to her jaw and skull have not resulted in any considerable alteration in her appearance. Nor, as has been alleged, was a heavy blow from the butt of a rifle responsible for the loss of numerous teeth in Frau Tchaikovsky’s mouth; rather, a dentist at Dalldorf Asylum extracted them. An examination of the handwriting of Tchaikovsky and Grand Duchess Anastasia shows that they are two different people. The greatest enigma, however, is that Frau Tchaikovsky speaks only German and has forgotten both English and Russian, while Grand Duchess Anastasia barely spoke German but conversed in English and in Russian.” Turning to her alleged knowledge and memories of life at court, the statement declared, “Frau Tchaikovsky, it must be noted, is not as mentally deficient and troubled as her supporters would lead us to believe, and she has long been acquainted with books and journal articles on the Tsar’s family and also freely associated with many monarchist émigrés in Berlin. This last group, naively believing that she was actually the Grand Duchess, unwittingly helped fill in gaps in her memory through stories and gifts of books and photographs. And thus it happened that her statements, which in the beginning were vague and halting and often incorrect, became by degrees more assured and accurate, as can be proved. In summation, her statements are without value, and Frau Tchaikovsky knows only what contemporary literature and Russian emigrants know of the Tsar’s family and court; she knows nothing intimate of the family, no sentiments or traditions, no nicknames, and no current relationships.”
1

It was precisely as Rathlef-Keilmann had been warned: take the case to the press and expect the battle over the claimant’s identity to become fodder for public controversy. Her articles continued, answered throughout the summer by Pierre Gilliard now, who for the first time publicly denounced the claimant in Swiss, French, and English magazines and newspapers; Rathlef-Keilmann replied in the press that autumn, calling Gilliard a liar who “victimizes this poor, helpless invalid at every turn.”
2
But she saved most of her venom for what almost everyone had feared and suspected: her book on the case, which arrived the following years in a burst of international publicity.

Anastasia: The Survivor of Ekaterinburg
, by Harriet von Rathlef-Keilmann, was a book whose very title boldly declared its conclusions. She was, she admitted, determined “to secure recognition for the person whose cause I am attempting to take up.”
3
Here was Anderson’s case as Rathlef-Keilmann saw it, as her supporters saw it, and as history would largely see it, full of favorable evidence and inexplicable knowledge, a tale, proclaimed the author, of “extraordinary tragedy and romance,” in which the “tortures of hell itself were meted out” to the claimant in her struggle to reclaim her lost identity.
4
Scars, memories, stories from those who said they knew Anastasia had been saved, had been taken to Bucharest—it all spilled across the pages of Rathlef-Keilmann’s book. Baroness Buxhoeveden and Princess Irene had been too confused, the claimant had been too ashamed, for their negative encounters to hold any meaning; the visits of Volkov, the Gilliards, and Olga Alexandrovna, on the other hand, were recalled in dramatic—and questionable—re-creations that left the reader with no doubt as to their initial, favorable opinions. And Rathlef-Keilmann served up the recognitions by Princess Xenia and Tatiana and Gleb Botkin, along with a string of mysterious, unnamed alleged witnesses who attested to Anastasia’s survival. It was all a compelling, convincing tapestry of evidence that Nicholas II’s youngest daughter was indeed alive.

The Romanovs, though, saw things differently. Olga Alexandrovna had initially been content to let the matter drop, to rest her case for history with the
National Tidende
article and in the statement issued on the death of the dowager empress, but these declarations had no effect on the public, and on a belief—now stoked by Rathlef-Keilmann—that she and others had first recognized the claimant as Anastasia and later rejected her. With Olga’s approval and full cooperation, and working with Count von Hardenberg, Pierre Gilliard now prepared to answer Rathlef-Keilmann in depth and very publicly, in his own book on the case. He had wanted to do so much earlier—had in fact been working with Konstantin Savitch, former president of the Court of Assizes in St. Petersburg, on collecting evidence against Anderson—but not until Rathlef-Keilmann’s book did the idea win royal and imperial approval.

Twelve months after Rathlef-Keilmann’s book came Gilliard’s
La Fausse Anastasie
, a book filled with statements and declarations from the claimant’s opponents, including Baron von Kleist, Baroness Buxhoeveden, Princess Irene, and others. For a man so determinedly eager to denounce Anderson, Gilliard adopted a surprisingly benign tone when discussing her. Perhaps she believed that she really was Anastasia, though Gilliard doubted this; she was, he admitted, a “pitiful creature” who “awoke in all who met her tender sympathies.”
5
Convinced that she was too unstable to have engineered what he believed to be a false claim, to have learned the multitude of detail about Anastasia’s life she seemed to possess, he pointed fingers at everyone surrounding the claimant, suggesting they had victimized her and filled her head with stories to advance her case.
6
Just as Gilliard served as Rathlef-Keilmann’s chief villain, so, too, did the former tutor accuse his nemesis of blatant deception. “All of the facts she presents,” he wrote, “are so distorted—when they are not simply made up out of whole cloth—that it becomes difficult for the reader who is not forewarned not to believe in the extraordinary adventure which is told.”
7

These two books offered the public two wildly irreconcilable views of Anderson’s case. Other claimants came and went, appeared to great fanfare, and then disappeared, but their tales weren’t debated by principal actors, in public, in the pages of newspapers and magazines, and in dueling books. It was Rathlef-Keilmann, published in Germany, Great Britain, and North America, widely distributed and promoted, serialized in magazines and newspapers, who won the publicity battle: Gilliard’s book, published only in French, quickly came and went, disappearing from stores soon after its printing. Thus it was Rathlef-Keilmann’s version of events that the public came to know, that captivated imaginations and left readers indignant over “Anastasia’s” callous rejection by her surviving relatives. And Rathlef-Keilmann had an unseen ally on her side: desire. Ten years had passed since the presumed execution, and still there were no bodies, no actual evidence that the Romanovs had all been killed, merely assumptions of what had happened and theories regarding the destruction of their remains. The veil of plausibility with which Rathlef-Keilmann’s book thus wrapped the claimant offered the public an appealing alternative to the shocking and bloody end in a grim Ekaterinburg cellar, a story that—for all of its twists and heart-wrenching developments—still somehow seemed redolent of the power of the human spirit to triumph over evil.

But if Gilliard’s book fell into obscurity, it—or more correctly, descriptions of it by those sympathetic to Anderson—assumed a pivotal role in her case, advanced as evidence that the former tutor was nothing short of a fraud himself, a man who repeatedly lied about the claimant. In typical fashion, Gleb Botkin thus declared that Gilliard’s book was filled with “deliberate untruths,” that he had used “retouched photographs and other faked or planted evidence,” and had done it all as a paid agent of Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse.
8
The anger stemmed from Gilliard’s attacks on several dozen of the claimant’s asserted memories, as related to him in Rathlef-Keilmann’s letters and in the latter’s book, errors he contended revealed that she could not be Anastasia. Those sympathetic to Anderson’s case took Botkin’s lead: Gilliard’s “vicious, vituperative” book was filled with “gross errors” and “inventions” designed to “put an end” to her “career.”
9

But what, precisely, was Gilliard supposed to have done in his “vicious, vituperative” book? Three issues were central, three of Anderson’s alleged memories as recorded by Rathlef-Keilmann, three claims that Gilliard completely rejected. “There was a palace at home,” Rathlef-Keilmann quoted the claimant, “the windowsills and columns of which were made of malachite.”
10
Gilliard dismissed this as “nothing but pure fantasy.”
11
Anderson’s supporters stumbled over themselves to point out the famous Malachite Hall in the Winter Palace, as well as another, similarly decorated room in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Why, they asked, did Gilliard lie?

In fact, he hadn’t. On January 1, 1926, Rathlef-Keilmann sent him notes of her conversations with the claimant, notes that quoted Anderson as saying, “In several rooms at Tsarskoye Selo, the sills of the windows were of malachite.”
12
This, Gilliard correctly replied, was wrong: there were no rooms in any of the palaces at Tsarskoye Selo with malachite-decorated windows. But when Rathlef-Keilmann reproduced the notes in her book, she edited out the claimant’s reference to Tsarskoye Selo, replacing it with the less definitive “at home.”

It wasn’t the only such contradiction. Anderson told Rathlef-Keilmann that she had been awarded her own infantry regiment and named honorary colonel in chief when she was fifteen. She could not remember the name of the regiment, just that that the soldiers wore dark blue uniforms, that she had reviewed them on horseback, and that the review had been held at Tsarskoye Selo.
13
Anastasia, of course, had indeed been named honorary colonel in chief of the 148th Caspian Infantry Rifle Regiment by her father when she turned fourteen, in 1915, but perhaps the claimant simply misremembered the year.
14
Rathlef-Keilmann sent these details to Gilliard; within a day, she wrote, he had replied confirming that everything the claimant had said was “quite accurate.”
15

Really? Not according to Gilliard, who had the documentation to prove it. On receiving Rathlef-Keilmann’s letter, he asked Colonel Vassili Koliubakin, former commander of the regiment, about the claimant’s statements and learned that the unit had been posted to Galicia at the time and that no review—at Tsarskoye Selo or elsewhere—had taken place. Later, Koliubakin alone had offered his congratulations, on behalf of his men, to Anastasia in a room at the Alexander Palace. There had been no other delegations, no blue uniforms, and no parade, facts also confirmed by General Michael Repiev, who had commanded the infantry divisions to which Anastasia’s regiment belonged.
16
This is what Gilliard communicated to Rathlef-Keilmann. And, as happened with the claimant’s erroneous description of a room at Tsarskoye Selo adorned with malachite windowsills, Rathlef-Keilmann again edited her notes to erase Anderson’s mistake before publishing them in her book. Now there was no mention of blue uniforms, or of a review at Tsarskoye Selo, though for some reason she retained the claimant’s statement “I myself took charge of the parade on horseback.”
17
Gleb Botkin insisted, not very convincingly, that it all must have been Rathlef-Keilmann’s mistake, that the claimant had meant to say that the uniforms bore blue piping.
18
Later, French journalist Dominique Auclères, who passionately believed in Anderson’s claim, apparently insisting that Gilliard had lied over the issue, swooped in to deliver what she believed to be the coup de grâce: the widow of a former regimental commander, she said, remembered that her late husband had recalled the ceremonial review on horseback—of “the Blue Regiment,” no less—that Anderson described. Unfortunately for Auclères, this source insisted upon a different year—1916; a different season—autumn, not summer; and a different place—Peterhof, not Tsarskoye Selo—none of which confirmed Anderson’s story except perhaps to those willing to reject the statements of the regimental commanders in an effort to embrace anything that supported her case.
19