The Resurrection of the Romanovs (33 page)

Anderson at Unterlengenhardt, 1960.

It was all, Anderson said, “like in a prison. I am a good business attraction for them—that Anastasia is living here means for all these cold business men good money, for it is very interesting for strangers to see the poor ape in the barrack. More I am not for nobody.”
52
Yet her self-imposed seclusion only stoked public interest: Who, really, was this enigmatic, middle-aged woman? Had surviving Romanov relatives knowingly rejected a surviving Anastasia? What languages did she really speak? How had she come by her scars? And if not Anastasia, how did she know so many obscure, intimate details about imperial life? This was the power of the myth laid down by Rathlef-Keilmann, a myth that had been challenged but that remained intact, a myth that the public refused to surrender. Too many words, photographs, and films had seeped into imaginations; for much of the world, whether proved or not, Anna Anderson had now become Anastasia.

15

Émigrés at War

It was building, slowly building, in these years, the intrigue over Anderson’s claim, an intrigue renewed by the books and films and new onslaught of unwelcome attention. And still Romanov relatives argued and fought, not just about her identity but also about how to deal with her claim and with each other. Only two members of the family had actually met and accepted her as Anastasia: Princess Xenia Georgievna and Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, both in 1928. The grand duke, immersed in his own inquiry, had met the claimant at the Palais Hotel in Paris before she sailed for America. Alexander Spiridovich, former head of Nicholas II’s Court Chancellery, saw Andrei stumble from the room, greatly agitated, “upset, and profoundly moved. He had tears in his eyes. For him, there was no doubt.”
1
He seems to have based his opinion merely on observation, for at their first meeting Anderson apparently refused to speak or to answer any of Andrei’s questions, hiding her face behind a sheet for most of the encounter; only later, as he bid her farewell, was the grand duke rewarded with a few German sentences.
2

“I had the opportunity,” Andrei reported to Serge Botkin, “to observe and judge the invalid closely over two days, and I can categorically state that there is no doubt in my mind that she is Grand Duchess Anastasia. It is out of the question not to recognize her. Naturally, the years and her suffering have left their mark, though not as much as I had imagined. Her face is profoundly sad, but when she smiles, she is, without doubt, Anastasia.”
3
And to his cousin Olga Alexandrovna he wrote, “I recognized her immediately, and further observation only confirmed my first impression. I really have no doubt on this: she is Anastasia.”
4
By this time, though, the grand duchess had long abandoned any initial hint of ambiguity, and she rejected Andrei’s pleas to meet the claimant again. Anderson’s opponents complained that Andrei was in no position to offer such a definite opinion on the subject, that as Nicholas II’s cousin his contact with Anastasia had been minimal, and that too many years had passed; her supporters countered by pointing out that the grand duke had served as a personal adjutant to the tsar and thus had regularly been on duty at Tsarskoye Selo throughout the First World War. In truth, both sides were correct. Andrei had seen a teenaged Anastasia roughly a dozen times in the last few years before the Revolution, many times in passing, and rarely when he was asked to join the imperial family for luncheon, tea, or dinner. Did this limited and periodic exposure leave him in a position to adequately assess the claimant? Apparently not, at least according to the grand duke himself, who had initially rejected the idea of meeting her by explaining to Tatiana Botkin, “I can’t trust my personal impressions. I wasn’t close enough to the tsar’s children to be able to identify Anastasia.”
5

Perhaps by 1928 the grand duke’s own investigation had led him to abandon his previous caution, or in embracing Rathlef-Keilmann’s evidence he was ready to be convinced. He made no statement, though the public learned of his opinion when the duke of Leuchtenberg published a private letter Andrei had sent him describing the favorable meeting in Paris. When Rathlef-Keilmann’s book was published, it also included a lengthy letter Andrei had written to her editor, printed as a preface that outlined all points in Anderson’s favor. “Her reminiscences, so far as I have been able to examine them,” he declared rather inaccurately, “yield a description, clear in every respect, of actual facts. Everything that she recalls is an absolutely accurate description of the life of the Imperial Family, including details that have never appeared in the Press. My own opinion is that the things that the patient remembers are such as only the Grand Duchess herself could recall.” He noted a “striking similarity” physically between the claimant and Anastasia, as well as what he called “the general family resemblance, which is in some respects of almost greater importance than a personal likeness.”
6

So infuriated was Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich by these developments that he immediately summoned his brother and demanded an explanation. Andrei admitted to recognizing the claimant, whom Kirill had branded “an adventuress,” but apparently denied that he had in any way authorized publication of any of his private correspondence. “Obviously,” Kirill wrote, “my brother was used.”
7
Whether this was true or not, Kirill ordered his brother to stop his investigation; by this time, Andrei had grown disgusted with Gleb Botkin’s tactics and readily bowed out, never uttering another public word about the claimant. In 1955, though, just a year before his death, he wrote a curious letter to his cousin Olga Alexandrovna: “I had always believed you to be angry with me owing to the Tchaikovsky Affair. This would have saddened me even more. My love for you is too great to cause any such pain. . . . As things now stand, I have never formally stated my opinion on the matter, because I have never entirely been convinced. . . . The mystery remains unsolved. . . . I’m incapable of resolving this question.”
8

Andrei’s son Vladimir commented that the grand duke “had been struck by a clear family resemblance. Sometimes, however, the detailed investigation, with its occasionally contradictory elements, did make him have doubts, and I can attest that in his files there is nothing that would prove one way or another whether the unknown woman is the daughter of Emperor Nicholas II. My father could never have sworn an oath either way in this case, being convinced that, like anyone, he could be mistaken.”
9
But Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg, one of Anderson’s most loyal supporters, thought that such revisions were merely attempts “to heal the quarrel” between Andrei and Olga over the claimant. He told case historian Brien Horan, “I saw Uncle Andrei shortly before his death and from the way he spoke about her, I had the impression that he still believed in her. I think his true opinion was his recognition of Anastasia after their rendezvous in 1928. It was a completely straightforward recognition based entirely on his personal impressions and on his research, and it was as yet uninfluenced by outside forces, such as his brother Kirill’s order to withdraw from the case.”
10
And Kirill’s daughter Princess Kira recalled that before his death, her Uncle Andrei “had tried to convince me that she was Anastasia.”
11

Kira wasn’t convinced. Only seven at the time of the Revolution, she had no real memories of Anastasia; when she finally met Anderson in 1952, she said, rather snobbishly, that she “was not a lady.” Her English, she said, “was not the English that was spoken in the family,” but rather seemed heavily accented—either Slavic or Polish, Kira thought. The idea that they might be cousins, Kira said, was “repulsive.”
12
But it was true, insisted Kira’s mother-in-law. This was Crown Princess Cecilie of Prussia, a woman with her own ties to the Romanovs: her mother, Grand Duchess Anastasia Mikhailovna, was a second cousin to Nicholas II and sister-in-law to his sister Xenia Alexandrovna. Cecilie first met Anderson in the 1920s; although she thought there was some vague resemblance, she hadn’t really known Anastasia, and besides, all of the relatives seemed so sure that she wasn’t genuine. But she followed the case in the press with some interest, and in 1952 visited Anderson at Unterlengenhardt. After several meetings, she said, “I am convinced that she is the Emperor’s youngest daughter. Now that she is a mature woman, I can occasionally detect in her the features of her mother. But more pointedly, her behavior and cordial manner suggest to me an intimate familiarity and past association that bonds those of common origin together.”
13

Kira later suggested, not very helpfully, that her mother-in-law had been mentally unstable, but it was a pointless exercise to ascribe recognitions in Anderson’s favor as the manifestation of some undiagnosed psychosis shared by her supporters, as some of the more unkind critics insinuated.
14
People seized upon the slightest coincidence—Marianne Nilov, widow of the imperial yacht’s captain, apparently thought the claimant had the same eyes as Nicholas II, the same way of laughing as Anastasia, while two of her husband’s former officers on the
Standart
, Baron George Taube and Vassili Woitinsky, found nothing at all in her to remind them of the grand duchess.
15
And many were genuinely convinced, and their conviction rested not on some imaginary delusion or elusively subjective factor, but rather on what they took for Anderson’s inexplicable knowledge. Such was the case with Ivan Arapov, a former patient in Anastasia’s hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. After reading of Anderson’s claim, he suggested that her American lawyer Edward Fallows ask if she recalled his name. “Does he limp?” Anderson asked. When Fallows said no, she insisted that the only Arapov known to her had limped; when Arapov heard this, he explained that he had been shot in the leg and had indeed limped during his stay in the hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. Later Arapov met Anderson in Berlin and pronounced her genuine.
16

Many others seemed genuinely conflicted. How else to explain the experience of Princess Vera Konstantinovna of Russia? Daughter of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, she had occasionally played with Nicholas and Alexandra’s youngest children, and her 1943 meeting with Anderson was fraught with confusing impressions. “I found a certain similarity,” she declared. “It is said that every person has a twin. Even the possibility of a Romanov or Hessian transgression flashed through my mind.”
17
Many years later, though, this seemingly favorable impression had been forgotten, as the princess offered ambivalent and contradictory statements on the claimant’s identity.
18

It was all too familiar, this decision to recognize or reject, this certainty that supposedly evaporated with the passing years, leaving only contradictory and impossibly tangled assertions that shrouded Anderson’s case in impenetrable layers of intriguing mystery. And that mystery deepened in 1932, with one of the most legendary episodes in the entire claim. The second son of Princess Irene of Prussia and a first cousin to Anastasia, Prince Sigismund had seen the Romanovs on family visits in Germany and in Russia, the last time in the autumn of 1912, when he and his mother had stayed with them at the Polish hunting lodge of Spala. Sigismund, who relocated to Costa Rica after the First World War with his wife, Princess Charlotte-Agnes of Saxe-Altenburg, initially had little interest in Anderson’s case. Irene, after all, had met with and rejected her in 1922, and Sigismund had no reason to question his mother’s judgment. But after the story broke, after rumors of familial indecision, after Rathlef-Keilmann’s book and its compendium of seemingly convincing evidence, Sigismund was intrigued enough to draw up a list of eighteen questions for the claimant, questions about “certain incidents that took place before the War,” he said, questions so obscure, so trivial that only the real Anastasia could answer them because both he and his brother-in-law Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg “had determined that they had not been mentioned in any memoirs or in the literature concerning the period.”
19

Prince Friedrich of Saxe-Altenburg.

Prince Friedrich met Anderson during a 1932 visit to Germany and presented her with the list. Both Sigismund and Friedrich refused to reveal these eighteen questions, apparently in the belief that Anderson’s opponents would somehow accuse them of having given her the answers in advance.
20
Yet three of the questions eventually leaked out. Sigismund wanted to know when he had last seen Anastasia. Anderson said that it had been in 1912. Where had they last met? Sigismund asked. At Spala in Poland, she declared. And, Sigismund asked, where had he stayed during the visit? In the rooms of Count Vladimir de Freedericksz, the minister of the imperial court, she replied. These answers, said Prince Sigismund, were not only correct but also, he insisted, “Could only have been given by the Grand Duchess herself. This, as well as everything I have since learned, convinced me that Frau Tchaikovsky is, without any doubt, Grand Duchess Anastasia.”
21

This is the stuff of which Anderson’s legend was made. How could an impostor know such unimportant yet convincing detail? Who but Anastasia could accurately answer these eighteen questions? These facts, coupled with the secrecy that enshrouded the questions and answers, made it all seem so compelling. Yet the truth is not nearly as convincing as history has been led to believe.

First, the questions: only three have been known—until now. The eighteen questions Prince Friedrich handed Anderson were: