The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (30 page)

At nine o’clock on the night of February 17, 1920—nineteen months after the murders in Ekaterinburg—a young woman jumped twenty feet from a bridge into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. A policeman saw her, rescued her, and took her to a hospital. She had no purse, no papers, no identification of any kind. Questioned when she recovered, she refused to say who she was, where she lived, or how she supported herself. When the police persisted, she pulled a blanket over her face and turned to the wall. After six weeks, she was sent to Dalldorf Mental Asylum as Fräulein Unbekannt and placed in a ward with fourteen other women. On arrival, her height was five feet, two inches, her weight, 110 pounds. Medical examination showed that her body was covered with scars and, so the doctors believed, that she was not a virgin. Her teeth were in poor condition, and seven or eight were extracted by asylum dentists.

She remained in Dalldorf for over two years. After months of silence, she began to talk to some of the nurses. Later, one—a Russian-speaking German—said that she spoke Russian “like a native.” In the autumn of 1921, turning through an illustrated magazine containing pictures of the Russian Imperial family, the patient asked another nurse whether she noticed any resemblance between herself and the tsar’s youngest daughter. When the nurse agreed that there was a resemblance, the patient declared that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia. Word filtered out of the hospital that Grand Duchess
Tatiana
was present, and Baroness Buxhoevden, a former lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra, came to see her. When the patient refused to speak and hid beneath her blanket, the baroness roughly pulled back the cover and then stormed away, declaring, “She’s too short to be Tatiana.” Subsequently, the patient told her nurses again that she was
Anastasia. At the end of May 1922, Fräulein Unbekannt left Dalldorf and went to live in a small Berlin apartment with a Russian Baltic baron and his wife. Soon the baron’s parlor was filled with other Russian emigres eager to see her for themselves and listen to her story.

According to her, when the bodies of her family were being carried from the cellar, one of the soldiers noticed that, although unconscious, she was still alive. This man, a Pole who assumed the name of Alexander Tschaikovsky, carried her, assisted by his brother Sergei, to his house in Ekaterinburg. Soon after, Alexander, Sergei, their mother, sister, and the semiconscious young woman fled Ekaterinburg in a peasant cart. Four and a half months and two thousand miles later, they crossed the border into Rumania and settled in Bucharest. There, to her distress, the young woman discovered that she was pregnant. Tschaikovsky confessed to rape. When the child, a son, was born out of wedlock, the mother wanted only to be rid of it. At the age of three months, the baby was handed over to Tschaikovsky’s mother and sister. “My only desire was that it would be taken away,” the baby’s mother said. The infant was placed in an orphanage and, thereafter, vanished from history and legend. At some point, according to one version of this tale, the mother and Alexander Tschaikovsky were married in a ceremony supposedly performed in a Roman Catholic church. Not long after, she said, Tschaikovsky was killed in a street fight in Bucharest.

The young woman said that she decided to go to Berlin to ask for help from Empress Alexandra’s sister Princess Irene of Prussia, who was Grand Duchess Anastasia’s godmother as well as her aunt. Because she had no passport and no money, a male companion, possibly Sergei Tschaikovsky, helped her to walk across Europe, crossing borders at night to avoid detection. Reaching Berlin, she went to Princess Irene’s Netherlands Palace. Standing alone before the gates, she decided that her aunt probably was not at home and that no one inside would recognize her. In a moment of despair, she threw herself into the canal.

That was her story of her escape. A subsequent check of the names of the guards at the Ipatiev House revealed no Alexander Tschaikovsky, nor, indeed, was there a family named Tschaikovsky living in
or near Ekaterinburg in 1918. During the 1920s, researchers in Bucharest discovered no trace of any Tschaikovsky living in that city, nor any record of a marriage and birth recorded under that name, nor any record of a murder or death in the streets or anywhere else of a man by the name. For Grand Duchess Anastasia to have spent months in Bucharest and not have appealed to Queen Marie of Rumania, who was a first cousin of both her father and her mother, whom she had seen in June 1914, when there was talk of a marriage between the Russian and Rumanian families, was, according to Marie’s daughter, “unexplainable.”

The claimant later said that she did not go to the queen in Bucharest because she was pregnant and ashamed. Anastasia’s aunt Grand Duchess Olga rejected that excuse, saying, “In 1918 or 1919,

Queen Marie would have recognized Anastasia on the spot.… Marie would never have been shocked at anything, and a niece of mine would have known it.…
My
niece would have known that her condition would indeed have shocked [Princess] Irene.” Thus, Olga found it unthinkable that a daughter of the tsar would turn her back on Queen Marie and walk across Europe to seek out Princess Irene.

All in all, “the escape” was perhaps the least verifiable of the chapters of the Anastasia legend; it had to be accepted on faith—as it was by her supporters—or rejected as wildly improbable—as it was by her opponents. In the end, it was no longer an issue. Those on either side of the argument were not interested in how she got away from the cellar. They wanted to know who she was.

Anastasia Nicholaevna, the fourth and youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, was born on June 18, 1901. Her older sisters Olga and Tatiana occupied the positions of authority among the Imperial children; her third sister, Marie, was gentle, merry, and flirtatious; this left Anastasia, a short, dumpy, blue-eyed child, to make her family reputation as a rebel and a wag. When the saluting cannon on the Imperial yacht fired at sunset, Anastasia retreated into a corner, stuck her fingers in her ears, widened her eyes, and lolled her tongue in mock terror. Quick-witted and comical, she
was also stubborn, mischievous, and impertinent. The same gift of ear and tongue that made her quickest among her sisters to pick up good pronunciation in foreign languages equipped her admirably as a mimic. She aped, sometimes cruelly, the speech and mannerisms of those about her. She climbed trees, refusing to come down until specifically commanded to do so by her father. She rarely cried. Her aunt Grand Duchess Olga remembered a time when Anastasia was teasing so ruthlessly that she slapped the child. The little girl’s face went crimson, but instead of crying she ran soundlessly out of the room. Sometimes, Anastasia’s practical jokes went too far. Once she rolled a rock into a snowball and threw it at Tatiana. The missile hit her sister in the face and knocked her, stunned, to the ground. Frightened, at last Anastasia cried.

As daughters of a Russian tsar, without a range of friends, the four grand duchesses were closer than most sisters. Olga, the eldest, was only six years older than Anastasia, the youngest. In adolescence, the four proclaimed their unity by choosing for themselves a single autograph, OTMA, derived from the first letter of each of their names. As OTMA, they jointly signed letters and gave gifts. They were brought up simply. They slept in hard camp beds without pillows and began each day with a cold bath. They worked alongside maids making their beds. They made requests rather than gave commands: “If it isn’t too difficult for you, my mother asks you to come.” Within the household, they were addressed not as Your Imperial Highness but in simple Russian fashion as Olga Nicholaevna or Anastasia Nicholaevna. Among themselves, to their father, and to the servants, they spoke Russian. To their mother, who was brought up in England by her grandmother Queen Victoria, they spoke English.

To those who knew them, the appearance and characteristics of the four grand duchesses were clearly distinct. Baroness Buxhoevden remembered Anastasia’s “fair hair, fine eyes, and dark eyebrows that nearly met.… She was rather short even at seventeen and … decidedly fat.… the originator of all mischief.” Tatiana Botkin, the daughter of the family doctor killed in the cellar, recalled Anastasia’s “luminous blue eyes” and that she was “lively, rough, mischievous.… When Anastasia Nicholaevna laughed, she would never turn her head
to look at you. She would glance at you from the corner of her eye with a roguish look.” Gleb Botkin, Tatiana’s younger brother, remembered Anastasia’s hair, “blond with a slightly reddish luster, long, wavy, and soft. Her features were irregular. Her nose was rather long and her mouth quite wide. She had a small, straight chin.” He also remembered her as autocratic and not in the least interested in what others thought of her. Anastasia’s cousin Princess Xenia, two years younger, recollected the youngest grand duchess as a playmate who was “frightfully temperamental, wild and rough,” who “cheated at games, kicked, scratched, and pulled hair.”

For eight years after being plucked from the canal, the claimant lived mostly in Germany. Beginning in 1922, members of the former German Imperial family, the Hohenzollerns, came to discover whether this was, in fact, their Russian relative. The first was Anastasia’s aunt Princess Irene of Prussia, married to the brother of the former kaiser. Aunt Irene had not seen her niece since 1913, before the outbreak of war between Germany and Russia, when Anastasia was twelve. Nine years had passed, enough to create difficulties in any remembrance, particularly of a sick person who had been through physical and emotional trauma. But Mrs. Tschaikovsky, as she now called herself, did not give her purported aunt a fair chance. Introduced under a false name, the princess stared hard across a table at the patient. Frightened, Mrs. Tschaikovsky jumped up and ran from the room. Princess Irene followed, but the patient turned away, put her face in her hands, and refused to speak. “She did not even answer when I asked her to say a word or give me a sign that she recognized me,” Princess Irene said. Offended by this behavior, the princess departed.

“I saw immediately that she could not be one of my nieces,” Irene wrote. “Even though I had not seen them for nine years, the fundamental facial characteristics could not have altered to that degree, in particular the position of the eyes, the ears, and so forth.” Later Princess Irene appeared less certain. “I could not have made a mistake,” she insisted when challenged by a nephew who believed in the claimant. “She
is
similar. She
is
similar. But what does that mean if it
is not she?” Confused and distraught, the princess wept. But she never returned to visit Mrs. Tschaikovsky.

Gradually, other members of the former German Imperial family followed. In 1925, Crown Princess Cecilie, the former kaiser’s daughter-in-law, called on the claimant. Cecilie was “struck at first by the young person’s resemblance to the tsar’s mother and to the tsar himself, but I could see nothing of the tsarina in her.” Again, Mrs. Tschaikovsky provided no help. “It was virtually impossible to communicate with the young person,” Cecilie observed. “She remained completely silent, either from obstinacy or because she was totally bewildered.” Subsequently, Crown Princess Cecilie’s opinion wavered, as had Princess Irene’s. “I almost believe it must be she,” Cecilie declared. But, as Anastasia’s Aunt Irene and her Uncle Ernest of Hesse opposed the claim, Cecilie decided that “it was not my business to follow up the question of her identity.” By 1952, after three subsequent visits to the claimant, the crown princess had changed her mind. “Today, I am convinced she is the tsar’s youngest daughter,” she said. “I detect her mother’s features in her.” Responding to a birthday gift, Cecilie wrote to the claimant, “God bless you with a tender kiss from your loving Aunt Cecilie.” Princess Cecilie told her daughter-in-law, Princess Kyra of Russia, married to her son Prince Louis Ferdinand, by then the Hohenzollern pretender, “This [the claimant] is your cousin.” Louis Ferdinand and Kyra did not agree. Across the bottom of Cecilie’s affidavit testifying to the claimant’s legitimacy, Louis Ferdinand scrawled in large pen strokes: “Kyra and I find no resemblance.”