The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (32 page)

The truth was that Olga, kindhearted, generous, and subject to powerful influence, was not sure. The night she returned to Copenhagen, even as she was writing the first of her notes to the patient in Berlin, Olga also wrote to Mrs. Tschaikovsky’s supporter, Ambassador Zahle: “I have had very long conversations with my mother and Uncle Waldemar all about our poor little friend. I can’t tell you how fond I got of her—whoever she is. My feeling is that she is not the one she believes—but one can’t say she is not as a fact—as there are many strange and inexplicable facts not cleared up.”

Thirty years later, looking back, Grand Duchess Olga was more decisively negative: “My beloved Anastasia was fifteen when I saw her for the last time in 1916. She would have been twenty-four in 1925. I thought Mrs. Anderson looked much older than that. Of course, one had to make allowances for a very long illness.… All the same, my niece’s features could not possibly have altered out of all recognition. The nose, the mouth, the eyes were all different.” Long before Grand Duchess Olga made this statement, however, the claimant had spoken the last word on their relationship. “It is now I who will not receive her,” said Mrs. Tschaikovsky.

Rejection, even tentative, by Grand Duchess Olga, the Romanov survivor who had known Anastasia best and the only one until then who had troubled to come to see her, was a blow to the claimant’s cause. The aunt’s opinion was taken as decisively negative by most of the family and by virtually all Russian emigres. Pierre Gilliard added ammunition to the opposition cause. He gave lectures and wrote articles
and eventually a book,
The False Anastasia
. He declared that he had known at first glance that the claimant was not his former pupil: “The patient had a long nose, strongly turned up at the end, a very large mouth, thick and fleshy lips; the grand duchess, on the other hand, had a short, sharp nose, a much smaller mouth and fine lips.… Apart from the color of the eyes, we could find nothing to make us believe that this was the grand duchess.” Everything the claimant knew about the intimate life of the Imperial family, Gilliard said, she had read in published memoirs or seen in photographs. He denounced Mrs. Tschaikovsky as “a vulgar adventuress” and “a first rate actress.”

In the years following Grand Duchess Olga’s rejection, only two Romanovs declared in the claimant’s favor. One was Grand Duke Andrew, Nicholas II’s first cousin, who had seen the young Anastasia occasionally at family lunches. Troubled by Mrs. Tschaikovsky’s claim, he received Empress Marie’s permission to take charge of the investigation. In January 1928, he spent two days with the claimant. After the first meeting, he cried happily, “I have seen Nicky’s daughter! I have seen Nicky’s daughter!” Later, he wrote to Grand Duchess Olga, “I have observed her carefully at close quarters, and to the best of my conscience I must acknowledge that Anastasia Tschaikovsky is none other than my niece the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nicholaevna. I recognized her at once, and further observation only confirmed my first impression. For me there is definitely no doubt: it is Anastasia.” On this same occasion, Grand Duke Andrew’s wife, the former prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, also met the claimant. In 1967, after Andrew’s death, his ninety-five-year-old widow, who three quarters of a century before had been the youthful Nicholas II’s mistress, was asked about the claimant. “I am still certain it was she,” Madame Kschessinska replied. “When she looked at me, you understand, with those eyes, that was it. It was the emperor … it was the emperor’s look. Anyone who saw the emperor’s eyes will never forget them.”

The other Romanov who endorsed the claimant was Anastasia’s cousin Princess Xenia of Russia, who at eighteen had married an American tin mining heir, William B. Leeds, and moved to his Long
Island estate in Oyster Bay. Xenia was two years younger than Anastasia and had last seen her in the Crimea in 1913, when she was ten and Anastasia twelve. Fourteen years had passed, but Xenia, having invited Mrs. Tschaikovsky to stay with her and having closely observed the claimant over a period of six months, declared, “I am firmly convinced.” Princess Xenia’s older sister, Princess Nina, also met the claimant and was more cautious. “Whoever she is,” said Princess Nina, “she is a lady of good society.”

The ultimate arbiter in the Romanov family was the Dowager Empress Marie, and, despite the old woman’s oft-reiterated hostility, Mrs. Tschaikovsky continued to hope that Marie would change her mind. “My grandmamma, she will know me,” the claimant believed. It fell to Tatiana Botkin to break the news that the empress would never receive her, that her grandmother wanted nothing to do with her, and that Mrs. Tschaikovsky should give up waiting for an invitation to Copenhagen. “Why do they reject me? What have I done?” the claimant cried out. She was told it was, in part, because of her illegitimate child. “I have not seen my child since he was three months old,” Mrs. Tschaikovsky protested. “Do you think I would allow any little bastard to proclaim himself the grandson of the tsar and the emperor of Russia?” But the dowager did not relent, and, to the claimant’s distress, Empress Marie died in October 1928, still forbidding and silent.

Worse immediately followed. Within twenty-four hours of the funeral, a document that came to be called the Romanov Declaration was published. Signed by twelve members of the Russian Imperial family, along with Empress Alexandra’s brother and two of her sisters, it announced their “unanimous conviction that the woman now living in the U.S.A. [Mrs. Tschaikovsky was with Princess Xenia on Long Island] is not the daughter of the tsar.” The document, which cited the opinions of Grand Duchess Olga, Pierre Gilliard, and Baroness Buxhoevden, largely convinced the public that the entire family had considered the evidence and rejected the claimant. But this was not what had happened. Of forty-four living Romanovs, only twelve had
signed. The two Romanovs who had accepted Mrs. Tschaikovsky’s claim, Grand Duke Andrew and Princess Xenia, were not invited to sign. Of the fifteen signatories (Empress Alexandra’s two sisters Princess Victoria of Battenberg and Princess Irene of Prussia and her brother, Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse, had also signed the document), only two, Grand Duchess Olga and Princess Irene, had ever seen the claimant.

The Romanov Declaration was first published not in Copenhagen, where the dowager empress had died, but in Hesse-Darmstadt, the home of Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse. Of all the claimant’s purported relatives, Ernest was the most implacably hostile. Her supporters believed that this hostility was founded on Ernest’s determination to preserve his own reputation, a determination so strong, as they saw it, that he was willing to override and suppress the identity and appeals of his sister’s only surviving child.

What happened was this: In 1925, the claimant told a friend that she hoped for a visit from her “Uncle Ernie,” whom she had not seen since his trip to Russia in 1916. In fact, in 1916, war was raging between Germany and Russia, and Ernest, a German general, was commanding troops on the western front. A trip to Russia, made without the knowledge of the German government or general staff, to visit his sister and his brother-in-law, the tsar, could have been construed as treason. Although the mission supposedly had been undertaken with the kaiser’s blessing to attempt to arrange a separate peace, the story was deeply embarrassing to the grand duke. Having been deposed from his small throne after the war, he still hoped to get it back, and an allegation of consorting with the enemy in wartime made that unlikely possibility still less likely.

The truth about this secret mission will never be known. History has revealed no record of it. Grand Duke Ernest’s diaries for this period deal with the western front, and his letters to his wife were posted from the same area. Undeniably, there was talk during this period, in both Russia and Germany, of holding discussions to terminate the carnage. According to an adviser to Grand Duke Ernest, there was a plan to go; the grand duke submitted his plan to the kaiser and was overruled. The witness did not know whether Ernest had gone ahead
on his own initiative. Another witness, the British ambassador Sir George Buchanan, wrote after the war that Grand Duke Ernest had sent an emissary in the person of a Russian woman to tell the tsar that the kaiser was prepared to grant Russia generous peace terms. Nicholas locked her up. In 1966, the kaiser’s stepson testified in court under oath that while in exile the kaiser had told him that Grand Duke Ernest had indeed been in Russia in 1916 to discuss the possibility of a separate peace. Also under oath, Crown Princess Cecilie declared of the Hessian visit to Russia, “I can assert from personal knowledge—the source is my father-in-law [i.e., the kaiser]—that our circles knew about it even at the time.”

The truth was unprovable, but, true or false, Mrs. Tschaikovsky’s statement was provocative. Had her description of “Uncle Ernie’s” trip proved accurate, her claim to be Grand Duchess Anastasia would have been powerfully reinforced: who but a daughter of the tsar could have known this secret? And even if her statement was false, one may wonder how a bedridden young woman in Berlin came up with such an intricate dynastic and diplomatic tale.

Grand Duke Ernest vehemently denied Mrs. Tschaikovsky’s story, denounced its author, and set out to attack her credibility with all the considerable resources at his command. She was an “impostor,” “a lunatic,” “a shameless creature.” Libel suits were threatened. Grand Duke Andrew was warned that continuation of his investigation into her identity could be “dangerous.” Ernest made an ally of Pierre Gilliard, who soon was spending as much time in Darmstadt as he was in Lausanne. And he joined in—some said he was behind and financed—an effort to prove not only that Mrs. Tschaikovsky was
not
Grand Duchess Anastasia but that she
was
somebody else.

In March 1927, a Berlin newspaper announced that Frau Tschaikovsky, the Anastasia claimant, actually was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker of peasant origin. The source for this scoop was a woman named Doris Wingender, who said that Franziska had been a lodger in her mother’s home until her disappearance in March 1920. Over two years later, during the summer of 1922, Doris reported,
Franziska had suddenly returned and said that she had been living with a number of Russian monarchist families “who apparently mistook her for someone else.” Franziska had stayed for three days, Doris continued, and while she was there, the two women had exchanged clothing: Franziska took from Doris a dark blue suit trimmed with black lace and red braid with buffalo-horn buttons and a small cornflower-blue hat sewn with six yellow flowers; she handed over a mauve dress, some monogrammed underwear, and a camel’s-hair coat. Then, once again, Franziska vanished.

To verify the story, the newspaper hired a detective, Martin Knopf, who took the clothing Franziska had left behind at the Wingenders’ to one of the Russian emigre households where Fräulein Unbekannt had stayed in 1922. Baron and Baroness von Kleist recognized it. “I bought the camel’s hair myself,” said the baron. “That’s the underwear. I monogrammed it myself,” cried the baroness. For the benefit of newspaper readers, “The Riddle of Anastasia” was solved. Doris Wingender helped out by supplying eyewitness descriptions of Franziska Schanzkowska: “stocky,” “big-boned,” “filthy and grubby,” with “work-worn hands” and “black stumps” of teeth. Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse was pleased; he told the author of the newspaper series that “the outcome of this case has rolled a great stone off my heart.”