Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia
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Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia ( – July 17, 1918) was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia
, the last sovereign of Imperial Russia, and his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna
.
Anastasia was a younger sister of Grand Duchess Olga
, Grand Duchess Tatiana
, and Grand Duchess Maria, and was an elder sister of Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia. She was murdered with her family on July 17, 1918, by forces of the Bolshevik
secret police
.
Persistent rumors of her possible escape have circulated since her death, fueled by the fact that the location of her burial was unknown during the decades of Communist rule. The mass grave near Ekaterinburg which held the remains of the Tsar, his wife, and three daughters was revealed in 1991, but the bodies of Alexei Nikolaevich and one of his sisters—either Anastasia or her older sister Maria—were not discovered there.
Her possible survival has been entirely disproven. In January 2008, Russian scientists announced that the charred remains of a young boy and a young woman found near Ekaterinburg in August 2007 were most likely those of the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich and one of the four Romanov grand duchesses. Russian forensic scientists confirmed on April 30, 2008, that the remains were those of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his four sisters. In March 2009 the final results of the DNA testing were published by Dr. Michael Coble of the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory
, proving conclusively that the remains of all four Grand Duchesses have now been accounted for, and no one escaped.
Several women have falsely claimed to have been Anastasia, the most notorious of whom was Anna Anderson
. Anderson's body was cremated upon her death in 1984, but DNA testing in 1994 on available pieces of Anderson's tissue and hair showed no relation to DNA of the Imperial family.
were disappointed to have a fourth daughter, because they wanted a son who would be heir to the throne. Tsar Nicholas II went for a long walk to compose himself before going to visit Tsarina Alexandra and the newborn Anastasia for the first time. One meaning of her name is "the breaker of chains" or "the prison opener." The fourth grand duchess received her name because, in honor of her birth, her father pardoned and reinstated students who had been imprisoned for participating in riots in St. Petersburg and Moscow the previous winter. Another meaning of the name is "of the resurrection," a fact often alluded to later in stories about her rumored survival. Anastasia's title is most precisely translated as "Grand Princess," meaning that Anastasia, as an "Imperial Highness" was higher in rank than other Princesses in Europe who were "Royal Highnesses." "Grand Duchess" became the most widely used translation of the title into English from Russian.
The Tsar's children were raised as simply as possible. They slept on hard camp cots without pillows, except when they were ill, took cold baths in the morning, and were expected to tidy their rooms and do needlework to be sold at various charity events when they were not otherwise occupied. Most in the household, including the servants, generally called the Grand Duchess by her first name and patronym, Anastasia Nikolaevna, and did not use her title or "Her Imperial Highness
." She was occasionally called by the French version of her name, "Anastasie," or by the Russian nicknames "Nastya," "Nastas," or "Nastenka." Other family nicknames for Anastasia were "Malenkaya," meaning "little (one)," or "shvibzik," the Russian word for "imp." Anastasia also had a deformity of her left foot, as did famous imposter, Anna Anderson.
Living up to her nicknames, young Anastasia grew into a vivacious and energetic child, described as short and inclined to be chubby, with blue eyes and strawberry-blonde hair. Margaretta Eagar
, a governess to the four Grand Duchesses, said one person commented that the toddler Anastasia had the greatest personal charm of any child he had ever seen.
While often described as gifted and bright, she was never interested in the restrictions of the school room, according to her tutors Pierre Gilliard
and Sydney Gibbes
. Gibbes, Gilliard, and ladies-in-waiting
Lili Dehn
and Anna Vyrubova
described Anastasia as lively, mischievous, and a gifted actress. Her sharp, witty remarks sometimes hit sensitive spots.
Anastasia's daring occasionally exceeded the limits of acceptable behavior. "She undoubtedly held the record for punishable deeds in her family, for in naughtiness she was a true genius," said Gleb Botkin
, son of the court physician Yevgeny Botkin
, who later died with the family at Ekaterinburg. Anastasia sometimes tripped the servants and played pranks on her tutors. As a child, she would climb trees and refuse to come down. Once, during a snowball fight
at the family's Polish estate, Anastasia rolled a rock into a snowball and threw it at her older sister Tatiana, knocking her to the ground. A distant cousin, Princess Nina Georgievna
, recalled that "Anastasia was nasty to the point of being evil," and would cheat, kick and scratch her playmates during games; she was affronted because the younger Nina was taller than she was. She was also less concerned about her appearance than her sisters. Hallie Erminie Rives
, a best-selling American author and wife of an American diplomat, described how 10-year-old Anastasia ate chocolates without bothering to remove her long, white opera gloves at the St. Petersburg opera house.
Anastasia and her older sister Maria were known within the family as "The Little Pair." The two girls shared a room, often wore variations of the same dress, and spent much of their time together. Their older sisters Olga and Tatiana also shared a room and were known as "The Big Pair." The four girls sometimes signed letters using the nickname, OTMA
, which was derived from the first letters of their first names.
Despite her energy, Anastasia's physical health was sometimes poor. The Grand Duchess suffered from the painful condition hallux valgus (bunions), which affected both of her big toes. Anastasia had a weak muscle in her back and was prescribed twice-weekly massage. She hid under the bed or in a cupboard to put off the massage. Anastasia's older sister, Maria, reportedly hemorrhaged in December 1914 during an operation to remove her tonsils, according to her paternal aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
, who was interviewed later in her life. The doctor performing the operation was so unnerved that he had to be ordered to continue by Maria's mother, Tsarina Alexandra. Olga Alexandrovna said she believed all four of her nieces bled more than was normal and believed they were carriers of the hemophilia gene, like their mother. Symptomatic carriers of the gene, while not hemophiliacs themselves, can have symptoms of hemophilia including a lower than normal blood clotting
factor that can lead to heavy bleeding. DNA testing on the remains of the royal family proved conclusively in 2009 that Alexei suffered from Hemophilia B, a rarer form of the disease. His mother and one of his sisters, identified by the Russians as Anastasia and by Americans as Maria, were carriers. Anastasia potentially would have passed on the disease if she had lived to have children. Anastasia, like all her family, doted on the long-awaited heir Tsarevich Alexei, or "Baby," who suffered frequent attacks of hemophilia and nearly died several times.
, a Russian peasant and wandering starets
or "holy man," and credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich on numerous occasions. Anastasia and her siblings were taught to view Rasputin as "Our Friend" and to share confidences with him. In the autumn of 1907, Anastasia's aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
was escorted to the nursery by the Tsar to meet Rasputin. Anastasia, her sisters and brother Alexei were all wearing their long white nightgowns.
"All the children seemed to like him," Olga Alexandrovna recalled. "They were completely at ease with him." Rasputin's friendship with the Imperial children was evident in some of the messages he sent to them. In February 1909, Rasputin sent the imperial children a telegram, advising them to "Love the whole of God's nature, the whole of His creation in particular this earth. The Mother of God was always occupied with flowers and needlework."
However, one of the girls' governesses, Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, was horrified in 1910 that Rasputin was permitted access to the nursery when the four girls were in their nightgowns and wanted him barred. Nicholas asked Rasputin to avoid going to the nurseries in the future. The children were aware of the tension and feared that their mother would be angered by Tyutcheva's actions. "I am so afr(aid) that S.I. (governess Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva) can speak...about our friend something bad," Anastasia's twelve-year-old sister Tatiana wrote to their mother on March 8, 1910. "I hope our nurse will be nice to our friend now." Alexandra eventually had Tyutcheva fired.
Tyutcheva took her story to other members of the family. While Rasputin's visits to the children were, by all accounts, completely innocent in nature, the family was scandalized. Tyutcheva told Nicholas's sister, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia
, that Rasputin visited the girls, talked with them while they were getting ready for bed, and hugged and patted them. Tyutcheva said the children had been taught not to discuss Rasputin with her and were careful to hide his visits from the nursery staff. Xenia wrote on March 15, 1910 that she couldn't understand "...the attitude of Alix and the children to that sinister Grigory (whom they consider to be almost a saint, when in fact he's only a khlyst
!)"
In the spring of 1910, Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, a royal governess, claimed that Rasputin had raped her. Vishnyakova said the empress refused to believe her account of the assault, and insisted that "everything Rasputin does is holy." Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna was told that Vishnyakova's claim had been immediately investigated, but instead "they caught the young woman in bed with a Cossack
of the Imperial Guard." Vishnyakova was kept from seeing Rasputin after she made her accusation and was eventually dismissed from her post in 1913.
However, rumours persisted and it was later whispered in society that Rasputin had seduced not only the Tsarina but also the four grand duchesses. The gossip was fueled by ardent, yet by all accounts innocent, letters written to Rasputin by the Tsarina and the four grand duchesses which were released by Rasputin and which circulated throughout society. "My dear, precious, only friend," wrote Anastasia. "How much I should like to see you again. You appeared to me today in a dream. I am always asking Mama when you will come...I think of you always, my dear, because you are so good to me ..."
This was followed by circulation of pornographic cartoons
, which depicted Rasputin having relations with the Empress, her four daughters and Anna Vyrubova. After the scandal, Nicholas ordered Rasputin to leave St. Petersburg for a time, much to Alexandra's displeasure, and Rasputin went on a pilgrimage to Palestine
. Despite the rumors, the imperial family's association with Rasputin continued until his murder on December 17, 1916. "Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone through heavy 'courses' for their age and their souls have much developed," Alexandra wrote to Nicholas on December 6, 1916.
In his memoirs, A.A. Mordvinov reported that the four Grand Duchesses appeared "cold and visibly terribly upset" by Rasputin's death, and sat "huddled up closely together" on a sofa in one of their bedrooms on the night they received the news. Mordvinov recalled that the young women were in a gloomy mood and seemed to sense the political upheaval that was about to be unleashed. Rasputin was buried with an icon signed on its reverse by Anastasia, her mother and her sisters. She attended his funeral on December 21, 1916, and her family planned to build a church over the site of Rasputin's grave. After they were killed by the Bolsheviks, it was discovered Anastasia and her sisters were all wearing amulets bearing Rasputin's picture and a prayer.
Anastasia, along with her sister Maria, visited wounded soldiers at a private hospital
on the grounds at Tsarskoye Selo
. The two teenagers, too young to become Red Cross nurses like their mother and elder sisters, played games of checkers and billiards
with the soldiers and tried to uplift their spirits. Felix Dassel, who was treated at the hospital and knew Anastasia, recalled that the grand duchess had a "laugh like a squirrel," and walked rapidly "as though she tripped along."
In February 1917, Nicholas II abdicated the throne and Anastasia and her family were placed under house arrest
at the Alexander Palace
in Tsarskoye Selo during the Russian Revolution
. As the Bolsheviks approached, Alexander Kerensky
of the Provisional Government
had them moved to Tobolsk
, Siberia
. After the Bolsheviks seized majority control of Russia, Anastasia and her family were moved to the Ipatiev House
, or House of Special Purpose, at Yekaterinburg
.
The stress and uncertainty of captivity took their toll on Anastasia as well as her family. "Goodby," she wrote to a friend in the winter of 1917. "Don't forget us." At Tobolsk, she wrote a melancholy theme for her English tutor, filled with spelling mistakes, about Evelyn Hope, a poem by Robert Browning
about a young girl: "When she died she was only sixteen years old," Anastasia wrote. "Ther(e) was a man who loved her without having seen her but (k)new her very well. And she he(a)rd of him also. He never could tell her that he loved her, and now she was dead. But still he thought that when he and she will live [their] next life whenever it will be that ..."
At Tobolsk, she and her sisters sewed jewels into their clothing in hopes of hiding them from their captors, since Alexandra had written to warn them that she, Nicholas and Maria had been searched upon arriving in Ekaterinburg, and had items confiscated. Their mother used predetermined code word
s "medicines" and "Sednev's belongings" for the jewels. Letters from Demidova to Tegleva gave the instructions.
Pierre Gilliard recalled his last sight of the children at Yekaterinburg: "The sailor Nagorny, who attended to Alexei Nikolaevitch, passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms, behind him came the Grand Duchesses loaded with valises and small personal belongings. I tried to get out, but was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry. I came back to the window. Tatiana Nikolayevna came last carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise. It was raining and I saw her feet sink into the mud at every step. Nagorny tried to come to her assistance; he was roughly pushed back by one of the commisars ..." Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden told of her sad last glimpse of Anastasia: "Once, standing on some steps at the door of a house close by, I saw a hand and a pink-sleeved arm opening the topmost pane. According to the blouse the hand must have belonged either to the Grand Duchess Marie or Anastasia. They could not see me through their windows, and this was to be the last glimpse that I was to have of any of them!"
However, even in the last months of her life, she found ways to enjoy herself. She and other members of the household performed plays for the enjoyment of their parents and others in the spring of 1918. Anastasia's performance made everyone howl with laughter, according to her tutor Sydney Gibbes. In a May 7, 1918 letter from Tobolsk to her sister Maria in Yekaterinburg, Anastasia described a moment of joy despite her sadness and loneliness and worry for the sick Alexei: "We played on the swing, that was when I roared with laughter, the fall was so wonderful! Indeed! I told the sisters about it so many times yesterday that they got quite fed up, but I could go on telling it masses of times ... What weather we've had! One could simply shout with joy." In his memoirs, one of the guards at the Ipatiev House, Alexander Strekotin, remembered Anastasia as "very friendly and full of fun," while another guard said Anastasia was "a very charming devil! She was mischievous and, I think, rarely tired. She was lively, and was fond of performing comic mimes with the dogs, as though they were performing in a circus." Yet another of the guards, however, called the youngest grand duchess "offensive and a terrorist" and complained that her occasionally provocative comments sometimes caused tension in the ranks. Anastasia and her sisters learned how to do their own laundry and assisted the cook in making bread while they were in captivity at the Ipatiev House.
In the summer, the privations of the captivity, including their closer confinement at the Ipatiev House negatively affected the family. According to some accounts, at one point Anastasia became so upset about the locked, painted windows that she opened one to look outside and get fresh air. A sentry reportedly saw her and fired, narrowly missing her. She did not try again. On July 14, 1918, local priests at Yekaterinburg conducted a private church service for the family. They reported that Anastasia and her family, contrary to custom, fell on their knees during the prayer for the dead, and that the girls had become despondent, hopeless, and no longer sang the replies in his service. Noticing this dramatic change in their demeanor since his last visit, one priest told the other, "Something has happened to them in there." But the next day, on July 15, 1918, Anastasia and her sisters appeared in good spirits as they joked and helped move the beds in their shared bedroom so that cleaning women could clean the floors. They helped the women scrub the floors and whispered to them when the guards weren't watching. Anastasia stuck her tongue out at Yakov Yurovsky
, the head of the detachment, when he momentarily turned his back and left the room.
Anastasia was executed along with her family by a firing squad
in the early morning of July 17, 1918. The execution was carried out by forces of the Bolshevik
secret police under the command of Yurovsky.
in October 1917, Russia quickly disintegrated into civil war. Negotiations for the release of the Romanovs between their Bolshevik (commonly referred to as 'Reds') captors and their extended family, many of whom were prominent members of the Royal Houses of Europe, stalled. As the Whites (loyalists still faithful to the Tsar and the principles of autocracy) advanced toward Yekaterinburg the Reds were in a precarious situation. The Reds knew Yekaterinburg would fall to the better manned and equipped White Army
. When the Whites reached Yekaterinburg, the Imperial Family had simply disappeared. The most widely accepted account was that the family had been murdered. This was due to an investigation by White Army Investigator Nicholas Sokolov, who came to the conclusion based on items that had belonged to the family being found thrown down a mine shaft
at Ganina Yama
.
The "Yurovsky Note," an account of the event filed by Yurovsky to his Bolshevik superiors following the murders, was found in 1989 and detailed in Edvard Radzinsky's 1992 book The Last Tsar. According to the note, on the night of the murders the family was awakened and told to dress. They were told they were being moved to a new location to ensure their safety in anticipation of the violence that might ensue when the White Army reached Yekaterinburg. Once dressed, the family and the small circle of servants who had remained with them were herded into a small room in the house's sub-basement and told to wait. Alexandra and Alexei sat in chairs provided by guards at the empress' request. After several minutes, the executioners entered the room, led by Yurovsky. Yurovsky quickly informed the Tsar and his family that they were to be executed. The Tsar had time to say only "What?" and turn to his family before he was killed by several bullets to the chest (not, as is commonly stated, to the head; his skull, recovered in 1991, bears no bullet wounds). The Tsar, the empress and two menservants were killed in the first episode of gunfire; Marie, Dr Botkin and the empress' maid Demidova were wounded. Thick smoke had filled the room from so many weapons being fired at close quarters, as well as from plaster dust released from the walls by bullets. To allow the haze to clear, the gunmen left the room for some minutes, leaving all the victims behind. When the gunman returned, Dr Botkin was shot and the Tsarevich Alexei was slaughtered, one gunman repeatedly trying to shoot or stab the boy in the torso. The jewels sewn in his clothes protected him, and finally another gunman fired two shots into his head. Tatiana and Olga were then killed by single bullets to the head.
The last victims, Maria, Anastasia and the maid Demidova, were on the floor beneath the room's one window. As the gunman approached, Maria stood and struggled with Ermakov as he tried to stab her. The jewels in her clothing shielded her, and Ermakov claimed that he killed her with a shot to the head. Ermakov then struggled with Anastasia, failed to stab her, and said he killed her, too, with a shot to the head. Maria's skull shows no trace of bullet wounds and it is unclear how she died. Ermakov was quite drunk during the murders and possibly his shot only creased Maria's scalp, knocking her unconscious and producing considerable blood flow, but not killing her. Then, as the bodies were taken out of the cellar room, two of the grand duchesses showed signs of life. One sat up and screamed, throwing her arm over her head, while the other, bleeding from the mouth, moaned and moved slightly. Since the head wounds inflicted on Olga and Tatiana were instantly fatal, it is likely that Maria, perhaps only unconscious, was the sister who screamed, while Anastasia may still have been able to move and moan. Although Ermakov's archived statement does not say so, he told his wife that Anastasia was finished off with bayonets, while Yurovsky wrote that as the bodies were carried out, one or more of the girls cried out and were clubbed on the back of the head. But again, the back of Maria's skull shows no traces of violence, and Anastasia's burned and fragmented remains, identified in 2009, offer no clues to the cause of her death.
, the most notorious Anastasia impostor, first surfaced publicly between 1920 and 1922. She contended that she had feigned death amongst the bodies of her family members and servants, and was able to make her escape with the help of a compassionate guard who rescued her from amongst the corpses after noticing that she was still alive. Her legal battle for recognition from 1938 to 1970 continued a lifelong controversy and was the longest running case ever heard by the German courts where it was officially filed. The final decision of the court was that Anderson had not provided sufficient proof to claim the identity of the grand duchess.
Anderson died in 1984 and her body was cremated. DNA tests were conducted in 1994 on a tissue sample from Anderson located in a hospital and the blood of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
, a grandnephew of Empress Alexandra. According to Dr. Gill who conducted the tests, "If you accept that these samples came from Anna Anderson, then Anna Anderson could not be related to Tsar Nicholas
or Tsarina Alexandra." Anderson's mitochondrial DNA
was a match with a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska, a missing Polish factory worker. Some supporters of Anderson's claim acknowledged that the DNA tests proving she could not have been the Grand Duchess had "won the day."
Anna Anderson was one of at least ten women who claimed to be Anastasia. Some other lesser known claimants were Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilyeva and Eugenia Smith
. Two young women claiming to be Anastasia and her sister Maria were taken in by a priest in the Ural Mountains
in 1919 where they lived as nuns until their deaths in 1964. They were buried under the names Anastasia and Maria Nikolaevna.
Rumors of Anastasia's survival were embellished with various contemporary reports of trains and houses being searched for 'Anastasia Romanov' by Bolshevik soldiers and secret police. When she was briefly imprisoned at Perm
in 1918, Princess Helena Petrovna
, the wife of Anastasia's distant cousin, Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia
, reported that a guard brought a girl who called herself Anastasia Romanova to her cell and asked if the girl was the daughter of the Tsar. Helena Petrovna said she did not recognize the girl and the guard took her away. Although other witnesses in Perm later reported that they saw Anastasia, her mother Alexandra Fyodorovna and sisters in Perm after the murder, that story is now widely discredited as nothing more than a rumor. Ironically, it now appears that rumors started to hide the fact that the family was dead actually fueled the rumors they were alive. A few days after they had been murdered, the German government sent several telegrams to Russia demanding 'the safety of the princesses of German blood'. Russia had recently signed a peace treaty
with the Germans, and did not want to upset them by letting them know the women were dead, so they told them they had been moved to a safer location. This may well be the source of the 'Perm' stories.
In another incident, eight witnesses reported the recapture of a young woman after an apparent escape attempt in September 1918 at a railway station at Siding 37, northwest of Perm. These witnesses were Maxim Grigoyev, Tatiana Sitnikova and her son Fyodor Sitnikov, Ivan Kuklin and Matrina Kuklina, Vassily Ryabov, Ustinya Varankina, and Dr. Pavel Utkin, a physician who treated the girl after the incident. Some of the witnesses identified the girl as Anastasia when they were shown photographs of the grand duchess by White Russian
Army investigators. Utkin also told the White Russian Army investigators that the injured girl, whom he treated at Cheka
headquarters in Perm, told him, "I am the daughter of the ruler, Anastasia." Utkin obtained a prescription from a pharmacy
for a patient named "N" at the orders of the secret police. White Army investigators later independently located records for the prescription. During the same time period in mid-1918 there were several reports of young people in Russia passing themselves off as Romanov escapees. Boris Soloviev, the husband of Rasputin's daughter Maria
, defrauded prominent Russian families by asking for money for a Romanov impostor to escape to China. Soloviev also found young women willing to masquerade as one of the grand duchesses to assist in deceiving the families he had defrauded.
Some biographers' accounts speculated that the opportunity for one or more of the guards to rescue a survivor existed. Yakov Yurovsky demanded that the guards come to his office and turn over items they had stolen following the murder. There was reportedly a span of time when the bodies of the victims were left largely unattended in the truck, in the basement and in the corridor of the house. Some guards who had not participated in the murders and had been sympathetic to the grand duchesses were reportedly left in the basement with the bodies.
There were also reports from Bulgaria
of the survival of Anastasia and her younger brother Tsarevich Alexei. In 1953, Peter Zamiatkin, who was reportedly a member of the guard of the Russian Imperial Family
, told a 16-year-old fellow hospital patient that he had taken Anastasia and Alexei to his birth village near Odessa at the request of the Tsar. After the assassination of the rest of the royal family, Zamiatkin reportedly escaped with the children via ship, sailing from Odessa to Alexandria. The alleged survivors, "Anastasia" and "Alexei," reportedly lived out their lives under assumed names in the Bulgarian town of Gabarevo near Kazanlak
. The Bulgarian Anastasia claimant called herself Eleonora Albertovna Kruger
and died in 1954.
. The grave had been found nearly a decade earlier, but was kept hidden by its discoverers from the Communists who still ruled Russia when the grave was originally found. The grave only held nine of the expected eleven sets of remains. DNA and skeletal analysis matched these remains to Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of the four Grand Duchesses (Olga, Tatiana and Maria). The other remains, with unrelated DNA, correspond to the family's doctor (Yevgeny Botkin
), their valet (Alexei Trupp), their cook (Ivan Kharitonov
) and Alexandra's maid (Anna Demidova
). The late forensic expert Dr. William Maples
decided that the Tsarevitch Alexei and Anastasia's bodies were missing from the family's grave. Russian scientists contested this conclusion, however, claiming that it was the body of Maria that was missing. The Russians identified Anastasia by using a computer program
to compare photos of the youngest grand duchess with the skulls of the victims from the mass grave. They estimated the height and width of the skulls where pieces of bone were missing. American scientists found this method inexact.
American scientists thought the missing body to be Anastasia because none of the female skeletons showed the evidence of immaturity, such as an immature collarbone, undescended wisdom teeth, or immature vertebrae in the back, that they would have expected to find in a seventeen year old. In 1998, when the remains of the Imperial Family were finally interred, a body measuring approximately 5'7" was buried under the name of Anastasia. Photographs taken of her standing beside her three sisters up until six months before the murders demonstrate that Anastasia was several inches shorter than all of them.
The account of the "Yurovsky Note" indicated that two of the bodies were removed from the main grave and cremated at an undisclosed area in order to further disguise the burials of the Tsar and his retinue, if the remains were discovered by the Whites, since the body count would not be correct. Searches of the area in subsequent years failed to turn up a cremation site or the remains of the two missing Romanov children. However, on August 23, 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg that appeared to match the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs. The archaeologists said the bones are from a boy who was roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman who was roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three years old. Anastasia was seventeen years and one month old at the time of the assassination, while her sister Maria was nineteen years, one month old and her brother Alexei was two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. Anastasia's elder sisters Olga and Tatiana were twenty-two and twenty-one years old respectively at the time of the assassination. Along with the remains of the two bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid
, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber." The bones were found using metal detector
s and metal rods as probes.
DNA testing by multiple international laboratories such as the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory
and Innsbruck Medical University
confirmed that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters, proving conclusively that all family members, including Anastasia, died in 1918. The parents and all five children are now accounted for, and each has his or her own unique DNA
profile. However, in the article Dr. Michael D. Coble (et al.) wrote (see ”Supporting Information”, in comments to Fig. S1):
Also, in the section "Discussion" of this article:
In 2000, Anastasia and her family were canonized
as passion bearer
s by the Russian Orthodox Church
. The family had previously been canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as holy martyrs
. The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were finally interred in the St. Catherine Chapel at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral
in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, eighty years after they were murdered.
films. The earliest, made in 1928, was called Clothes Make the Woman. The story followed a woman who turns up to play the part of a rescued Anastasia for a Hollywood film, and ends up being recognized by the Russian soldier who originally rescued her from her would-be assassins.
The most famous is probably the highly fictionalized 1956 Anastasia starring Ingrid Bergman
as Anna Anderson
, Yul Brynner
as General Bounine (a fictional character
based on several actual men), and Helen Hayes
as the Dowager Empress Marie, Anastasia's paternal grandmother. The film tells the story of a woman from an asylum who appears in Paris
in 1928 and is captured by several Russian émigrés who feed her information so that they can fool Anastasia's grandmother into thinking Anderson actually is her granddaughter in order to obtain a Tsarist fortune. As time goes by they begin to suspect that this "Madame A. Anderson" really is the missing Grand Duchess.
The story served as the basis for the short-lived 1965 musical Anya
.
In 1986, NBC broadcast a mini-series
loosely based on a book published in 1983 by Peter Kurth called Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson. The movie, Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna
was a two-part series which began with the young Anastasia Nicholaievna and her family being sent to Yekaterinburg, where they are executed by Bolshevik soldiers. The story then moves to 1923, and while taking great liberties, fictitiously follows the claims of the woman known as Anna Anderson. Amy Irving
portrays the adult Anna Anderson.
The most recent film is 1997's Anastasia
, an animated musical adaptation of the story of Anastasia's fictional escape from Russia and her subsequent quest for recognition. The film took greater liberties with historical fact than the 1956 film of the same name.
In The Romanov Prophecy,
a 2004 novel by Steve Berry, the wounded Anastasia and Alexei are rescued by guards and spirited away to the United States, where they live under assumed names with a family of loyalists paid by Felix Yusupov
. In the novel, both children died of illnesses in the 1920s, but not before Alexei married and fathered a son.
Nicholas II of Russia
Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia, Grand Prince of Finland, and titular King of Poland. His official short title was Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias and he is known as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church.Nicholas II ruled from 1894 until...
, the last sovereign of Imperial Russia, and his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna
Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse
Alix of Hesse and by Rhine later Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova , was Empress consort of Russia as spouse of Nicholas II, the last Emperor of the Russian Empire...
.
Anastasia was a younger sister of Grand Duchess Olga
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia ; , November 16 after 1900 – July 17, 1918) was the eldest daughter of the last autocratic ruler of the Russian Empire, Emperor Nicholas II, and of Empress Alexandra of Russia....
, Grand Duchess Tatiana
Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia
Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia , , was the second daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last monarch of Russia, and of Tsarina Alexandra...
, and Grand Duchess Maria, and was an elder sister of Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia. She was murdered with her family on July 17, 1918, by forces of the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
secret police
Secret police
Secret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....
.
Persistent rumors of her possible escape have circulated since her death, fueled by the fact that the location of her burial was unknown during the decades of Communist rule. The mass grave near Ekaterinburg which held the remains of the Tsar, his wife, and three daughters was revealed in 1991, but the bodies of Alexei Nikolaevich and one of his sisters—either Anastasia or her older sister Maria—were not discovered there.
Her possible survival has been entirely disproven. In January 2008, Russian scientists announced that the charred remains of a young boy and a young woman found near Ekaterinburg in August 2007 were most likely those of the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich and one of the four Romanov grand duchesses. Russian forensic scientists confirmed on April 30, 2008, that the remains were those of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his four sisters. In March 2009 the final results of the DNA testing were published by Dr. Michael Coble of the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory
Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory
The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory is a forensics laboratory specializing in DNA profiling run by the United States Armed Forces and located in Rockville, Maryland....
, proving conclusively that the remains of all four Grand Duchesses have now been accounted for, and no one escaped.
Several women have falsely claimed to have been Anastasia, the most notorious of whom was Anna Anderson
Anna Anderson
Anna Anderson was the best known of several impostors who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia...
. Anderson's body was cremated upon her death in 1984, but DNA testing in 1994 on available pieces of Anderson's tissue and hair showed no relation to DNA of the Imperial family.
Life and childhood
When Anastasia was born, her parents and extended familyExtended family
The term extended family has several distinct meanings. In modern Western cultures dominated by nuclear family constructs, it has come to be used generically to refer to grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, whether they live together within the same household or not. However, it may also refer...
were disappointed to have a fourth daughter, because they wanted a son who would be heir to the throne. Tsar Nicholas II went for a long walk to compose himself before going to visit Tsarina Alexandra and the newborn Anastasia for the first time. One meaning of her name is "the breaker of chains" or "the prison opener." The fourth grand duchess received her name because, in honor of her birth, her father pardoned and reinstated students who had been imprisoned for participating in riots in St. Petersburg and Moscow the previous winter. Another meaning of the name is "of the resurrection," a fact often alluded to later in stories about her rumored survival. Anastasia's title is most precisely translated as "Grand Princess," meaning that Anastasia, as an "Imperial Highness" was higher in rank than other Princesses in Europe who were "Royal Highnesses." "Grand Duchess" became the most widely used translation of the title into English from Russian.
The Tsar's children were raised as simply as possible. They slept on hard camp cots without pillows, except when they were ill, took cold baths in the morning, and were expected to tidy their rooms and do needlework to be sold at various charity events when they were not otherwise occupied. Most in the household, including the servants, generally called the Grand Duchess by her first name and patronym, Anastasia Nikolaevna, and did not use her title or "Her Imperial Highness
Imperial Highness
His/Her Imperial Highness is a style used by members of an imperial family to denote imperial - as opposed to royal - status to show that the holder in question is descended from an Emperor rather than a King .Today the style has mainly fallen from use with the exception of the Imperial Family of...
." She was occasionally called by the French version of her name, "Anastasie," or by the Russian nicknames "Nastya," "Nastas," or "Nastenka." Other family nicknames for Anastasia were "Malenkaya," meaning "little (one)," or "shvibzik," the Russian word for "imp." Anastasia also had a deformity of her left foot, as did famous imposter, Anna Anderson.
Living up to her nicknames, young Anastasia grew into a vivacious and energetic child, described as short and inclined to be chubby, with blue eyes and strawberry-blonde hair. Margaretta Eagar
Margaretta Eagar
Margaretta Alexandra Eagar, also known as Margaret Eagar, , was a nanny for the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, known collectively as OTMA: The Grand Duchesses Olga ; Tatiana ; Maria ; and Anastasia Margaretta Alexandra Eagar, also known as Margaret Eagar, (August 12, 1863...
, a governess to the four Grand Duchesses, said one person commented that the toddler Anastasia had the greatest personal charm of any child he had ever seen.
While often described as gifted and bright, she was never interested in the restrictions of the school room, according to her tutors Pierre Gilliard
Pierre Gilliard
Pierre Gilliard was a Swiss academic, who was French language tutor to the five children of Tsar Nicholas II from 1905 to 1918. Years after the Imperial Family was assassinated by the Bolsheviks in July 1918, Gilliard wrote a book Thirteen Years at the Russian Court, about his time with the family...
and Sydney Gibbes
Charles Sydney Gibbes
Charles Sydney Gibbes was the English tutor of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia. Later in his life he became an Orthodox monk, adopting the name of Nicholas after Saint Nicholas The Passion Bearer. After his return to Britain he became a prominent figure in Orthodoxy in Britain...
. Gibbes, Gilliard, and ladies-in-waiting
Lady-in-waiting
A lady-in-waiting is a female personal assistant at a royal court, attending on a queen, a princess, or a high-ranking noblewoman. Historically, in Europe a lady-in-waiting was often a noblewoman from a family highly thought of in good society, but was of lower rank than the woman on whom she...
Lili Dehn
Lili Dehn
Lili Dehn, or Lili von Dehn, born Yulia Alexandrovna Smolskaia, , was the wife of a Russian naval officer and a friend to Tsarina Alexandra....
and Anna Vyrubova
Anna Vyrubova
Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova, née Taneyeva , was a lady-in-waiting, best friend and confidante to Tsaritsa Alexandra Fyodorovna.-Early life:...
described Anastasia as lively, mischievous, and a gifted actress. Her sharp, witty remarks sometimes hit sensitive spots.
Anastasia's daring occasionally exceeded the limits of acceptable behavior. "She undoubtedly held the record for punishable deeds in her family, for in naughtiness she was a true genius," said Gleb Botkin
Gleb Botkin
Gleb Evgenievich Botkin was the son of Dr. Eugene Botkin, the court physician who was murdered at Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks with Tsar Nicholas II and his family on July 17, 1918....
, son of the court physician Yevgeny Botkin
Eugene Botkin
Yevgeny Sergeyevich Botkin was the court physician for Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra and, while in exile with the family, sometimes treated the hemophilia-related complications of the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia.Botkin went into exile with the Romanovs following the Russian...
, who later died with the family at Ekaterinburg. Anastasia sometimes tripped the servants and played pranks on her tutors. As a child, she would climb trees and refuse to come down. Once, during a snowball fight
Snowball fight
A snowball fight is a physical game in which balls of snow are thrown with the intention of hitting somebody else. The game is similar to dodgeball in its major factors, though typically less organized. This activity is primarily played during months when there is sufficient snowfall.Today, the...
at the family's Polish estate, Anastasia rolled a rock into a snowball and threw it at her older sister Tatiana, knocking her to the ground. A distant cousin, Princess Nina Georgievna
Princess Nina Georgievna of Russia
Princess Nina Georgievna of Russia, , was the eldest daughter of Grand Duke George Mikhailovich and Grand Duchess Maria Georgievna of Russia. A great-granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, she left her native country in 1914, before World War I...
, recalled that "Anastasia was nasty to the point of being evil," and would cheat, kick and scratch her playmates during games; she was affronted because the younger Nina was taller than she was. She was also less concerned about her appearance than her sisters. Hallie Erminie Rives
Hallie Erminie Rives
Hallie Erminie Rives was a best-selling popular novelist and wife of the American diplomat Post Wheeler.She was born in Kentucky, the daughter of Stephen Turner Rives and Mary Ragsdale. Her father was from a prominent Virginia family. She was a distant cousin of the novelist and poet Amélie Rives...
, a best-selling American author and wife of an American diplomat, described how 10-year-old Anastasia ate chocolates without bothering to remove her long, white opera gloves at the St. Petersburg opera house.
Anastasia and her older sister Maria were known within the family as "The Little Pair." The two girls shared a room, often wore variations of the same dress, and spent much of their time together. Their older sisters Olga and Tatiana also shared a room and were known as "The Big Pair." The four girls sometimes signed letters using the nickname, OTMA
OTMA
OTMA was an acronym sometimes used by the four daughters of Russian emperor Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna as a group nickname for themselves, built from the first letter of each girl's name in the order of their births:...
, which was derived from the first letters of their first names.
Despite her energy, Anastasia's physical health was sometimes poor. The Grand Duchess suffered from the painful condition hallux valgus (bunions), which affected both of her big toes. Anastasia had a weak muscle in her back and was prescribed twice-weekly massage. She hid under the bed or in a cupboard to put off the massage. Anastasia's older sister, Maria, reportedly hemorrhaged in December 1914 during an operation to remove her tonsils, according to her paternal aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia was the youngest child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia. Her older brother was Tsar Nicholas II....
, who was interviewed later in her life. The doctor performing the operation was so unnerved that he had to be ordered to continue by Maria's mother, Tsarina Alexandra. Olga Alexandrovna said she believed all four of her nieces bled more than was normal and believed they were carriers of the hemophilia gene, like their mother. Symptomatic carriers of the gene, while not hemophiliacs themselves, can have symptoms of hemophilia including a lower than normal blood clotting
Coagulation
Coagulation is a complex process by which blood forms clots. It is an important part of hemostasis, the cessation of blood loss from a damaged vessel, wherein a damaged blood vessel wall is covered by a platelet and fibrin-containing clot to stop bleeding and begin repair of the damaged vessel...
factor that can lead to heavy bleeding. DNA testing on the remains of the royal family proved conclusively in 2009 that Alexei suffered from Hemophilia B, a rarer form of the disease. His mother and one of his sisters, identified by the Russians as Anastasia and by Americans as Maria, were carriers. Anastasia potentially would have passed on the disease if she had lived to have children. Anastasia, like all her family, doted on the long-awaited heir Tsarevich Alexei, or "Baby," who suffered frequent attacks of hemophilia and nearly died several times.
Association with Grigori Rasputin
Her mother relied on the counsel of Grigori RasputinGrigori Rasputin
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a Russian Orthodox Christian and mystic who is perceived as having influenced the latter days of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their only son Alexei...
, a Russian peasant and wandering starets
Starets
A starets is an elder of a Russian Orthodox monastery who functions as venerated adviser and teacher. Elders or spiritual fathers are charismatic spiritual leaders whose wisdom stems from God as obtained from ascetic experience...
or "holy man," and credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich on numerous occasions. Anastasia and her siblings were taught to view Rasputin as "Our Friend" and to share confidences with him. In the autumn of 1907, Anastasia's aunt Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia was the youngest child of Emperor Alexander III of Russia. Her older brother was Tsar Nicholas II....
was escorted to the nursery by the Tsar to meet Rasputin. Anastasia, her sisters and brother Alexei were all wearing their long white nightgowns.
"All the children seemed to like him," Olga Alexandrovna recalled. "They were completely at ease with him." Rasputin's friendship with the Imperial children was evident in some of the messages he sent to them. In February 1909, Rasputin sent the imperial children a telegram, advising them to "Love the whole of God's nature, the whole of His creation in particular this earth. The Mother of God was always occupied with flowers and needlework."
However, one of the girls' governesses, Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva, was horrified in 1910 that Rasputin was permitted access to the nursery when the four girls were in their nightgowns and wanted him barred. Nicholas asked Rasputin to avoid going to the nurseries in the future. The children were aware of the tension and feared that their mother would be angered by Tyutcheva's actions. "I am so afr(aid) that S.I. (governess Sofia Ivanovna Tyutcheva) can speak...about our friend something bad," Anastasia's twelve-year-old sister Tatiana wrote to their mother on March 8, 1910. "I hope our nurse will be nice to our friend now." Alexandra eventually had Tyutcheva fired.
Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia
Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia was a daughter of Tsar Alexander III of Russia and the elder of Tsar Nicholas II two sisters. She married her cousin Grand Duke Alexander Mikailovich of Russia, with whom she had seven children....
, that Rasputin visited the girls, talked with them while they were getting ready for bed, and hugged and patted them. Tyutcheva said the children had been taught not to discuss Rasputin with her and were careful to hide his visits from the nursery staff. Xenia wrote on March 15, 1910 that she couldn't understand "...the attitude of Alix and the children to that sinister Grigory (whom they consider to be almost a saint, when in fact he's only a khlyst
Khlysts
Khlysts or Khlysty was an underground sect from late 17th to early 20th century that split off the Russian Orthodox Church and belonged to the Spiritual Christians tendency.-Definition:...
!)"
In the spring of 1910, Maria Ivanovna Vishnyakova, a royal governess, claimed that Rasputin had raped her. Vishnyakova said the empress refused to believe her account of the assault, and insisted that "everything Rasputin does is holy." Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna was told that Vishnyakova's claim had been immediately investigated, but instead "they caught the young woman in bed with a Cossack
Cossack
Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who originally were members of democratic, semi-military communities in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia inhabiting sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper and Don basins and who played an important role in the...
of the Imperial Guard." Vishnyakova was kept from seeing Rasputin after she made her accusation and was eventually dismissed from her post in 1913.
However, rumours persisted and it was later whispered in society that Rasputin had seduced not only the Tsarina but also the four grand duchesses. The gossip was fueled by ardent, yet by all accounts innocent, letters written to Rasputin by the Tsarina and the four grand duchesses which were released by Rasputin and which circulated throughout society. "My dear, precious, only friend," wrote Anastasia. "How much I should like to see you again. You appeared to me today in a dream. I am always asking Mama when you will come...I think of you always, my dear, because you are so good to me ..."
This was followed by circulation of pornographic cartoons
Cartoon pornography
Cartoon pornography is the portrayal of illustrated or animated fictional characters in erotic or sexual situations. Cartoon pornography includes but is not limited to parody renditions of famous cartoons and comics.-Non-parody artists:...
, which depicted Rasputin having relations with the Empress, her four daughters and Anna Vyrubova. After the scandal, Nicholas ordered Rasputin to leave St. Petersburg for a time, much to Alexandra's displeasure, and Rasputin went on a pilgrimage to Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
. Despite the rumors, the imperial family's association with Rasputin continued until his murder on December 17, 1916. "Our Friend is so contented with our girlies, says they have gone through heavy 'courses' for their age and their souls have much developed," Alexandra wrote to Nicholas on December 6, 1916.
In his memoirs, A.A. Mordvinov reported that the four Grand Duchesses appeared "cold and visibly terribly upset" by Rasputin's death, and sat "huddled up closely together" on a sofa in one of their bedrooms on the night they received the news. Mordvinov recalled that the young women were in a gloomy mood and seemed to sense the political upheaval that was about to be unleashed. Rasputin was buried with an icon signed on its reverse by Anastasia, her mother and her sisters. She attended his funeral on December 21, 1916, and her family planned to build a church over the site of Rasputin's grave. After they were killed by the Bolsheviks, it was discovered Anastasia and her sisters were all wearing amulets bearing Rasputin's picture and a prayer.
World War I and revolution
During World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
Anastasia, along with her sister Maria, visited wounded soldiers at a private hospital
Private hospital
A private hospital is a hospital owned by a profit company or a non-profit organisation and privately funded through payment for medical services by patients themselves, by insurers, or by foreign embassies. This practice is very common in the United States and Australia...
on the grounds at Tsarskoye Selo
Tsarskoye Selo
Tsarskoye Selo is the town containing a former Russian residence of the imperial family and visiting nobility, located south from the center of St. Petersburg. It is now part of the town of Pushkin and of the World Heritage Site Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.-History:In...
. The two teenagers, too young to become Red Cross nurses like their mother and elder sisters, played games of checkers and billiards
Billiards
Cue sports , also known as billiard sports, are a wide variety of games of skill generally played with a cue stick which is used to strike billiard balls, moving them around a cloth-covered billiards table bounded by rubber .Historically, the umbrella term was billiards...
with the soldiers and tried to uplift their spirits. Felix Dassel, who was treated at the hospital and knew Anastasia, recalled that the grand duchess had a "laugh like a squirrel," and walked rapidly "as though she tripped along."
In February 1917, Nicholas II abdicated the throne and Anastasia and her family were placed under house arrest
House arrest
In justice and law, house arrest is a measure by which a person is confined by the authorities to his or her residence. Travel is usually restricted, if allowed at all...
at the Alexander Palace
Alexander Palace
The Alexander Palace is a former imperial residence at Tsarskoye Selo, on a plateau around 30 minutes by train from St Petersburg. It is known as the favourite residence of the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas II, and his family and their initial place of imprisonment after the revolution that...
in Tsarskoye Selo during the Russian Revolution
February Revolution
The February Revolution of 1917 was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. Centered around the then capital Petrograd in March . Its immediate result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the end of the Romanov dynasty, and the end of the Russian Empire...
. As the Bolsheviks approached, Alexander Kerensky
Alexander Kerensky
Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky was a major political leader before and during the Russian Revolutions of 1917.Kerensky served as the second Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government until Vladimir Lenin was elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets following the October Revolution...
of the Provisional Government
Provisional government
A provisional government is an emergency or interim government set up when a political void has been created by the collapse of a very large government. The early provisional governments were created to prepare for the return of royal rule...
had them moved to Tobolsk
Tobolsk
Tobolsk is a town in Tyumen Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh Rivers. It is a historic capital of Siberia. Population: -History:...
, Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
. After the Bolsheviks seized majority control of Russia, Anastasia and her family were moved to the Ipatiev House
Ipatiev House
Ipatiev House was a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg where the former Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, his family and members of his household were executed following the Bolshevik Revolution...
, or House of Special Purpose, at Yekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg is a major city in the central part of Russia, the administrative center of Sverdlovsk Oblast. Situated on the eastern side of the Ural mountain range, it is the main industrial and cultural center of the Urals Federal District with a population of 1,350,136 , making it Russia's...
.
The stress and uncertainty of captivity took their toll on Anastasia as well as her family. "Goodby," she wrote to a friend in the winter of 1917. "Don't forget us." At Tobolsk, she wrote a melancholy theme for her English tutor, filled with spelling mistakes, about Evelyn Hope, a poem by Robert Browning
Robert Browning
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.-Early years:...
about a young girl: "When she died she was only sixteen years old," Anastasia wrote. "Ther(e) was a man who loved her without having seen her but (k)new her very well. And she he(a)rd of him also. He never could tell her that he loved her, and now she was dead. But still he thought that when he and she will live [their] next life whenever it will be that ..."
Code word
In communication, a code word is an element of a standardized code or protocol. Each code word is assembled in accordance with the specific rules of the code and assigned a unique meaning...
s "medicines" and "Sednev's belongings" for the jewels. Letters from Demidova to Tegleva gave the instructions.
Pierre Gilliard recalled his last sight of the children at Yekaterinburg: "The sailor Nagorny, who attended to Alexei Nikolaevitch, passed my window carrying the sick boy in his arms, behind him came the Grand Duchesses loaded with valises and small personal belongings. I tried to get out, but was roughly pushed back into the carriage by the sentry. I came back to the window. Tatiana Nikolayevna came last carrying her little dog and struggling to drag a heavy brown valise. It was raining and I saw her feet sink into the mud at every step. Nagorny tried to come to her assistance; he was roughly pushed back by one of the commisars ..." Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden told of her sad last glimpse of Anastasia: "Once, standing on some steps at the door of a house close by, I saw a hand and a pink-sleeved arm opening the topmost pane. According to the blouse the hand must have belonged either to the Grand Duchess Marie or Anastasia. They could not see me through their windows, and this was to be the last glimpse that I was to have of any of them!"
However, even in the last months of her life, she found ways to enjoy herself. She and other members of the household performed plays for the enjoyment of their parents and others in the spring of 1918. Anastasia's performance made everyone howl with laughter, according to her tutor Sydney Gibbes. In a May 7, 1918 letter from Tobolsk to her sister Maria in Yekaterinburg, Anastasia described a moment of joy despite her sadness and loneliness and worry for the sick Alexei: "We played on the swing, that was when I roared with laughter, the fall was so wonderful! Indeed! I told the sisters about it so many times yesterday that they got quite fed up, but I could go on telling it masses of times ... What weather we've had! One could simply shout with joy." In his memoirs, one of the guards at the Ipatiev House, Alexander Strekotin, remembered Anastasia as "very friendly and full of fun," while another guard said Anastasia was "a very charming devil! She was mischievous and, I think, rarely tired. She was lively, and was fond of performing comic mimes with the dogs, as though they were performing in a circus." Yet another of the guards, however, called the youngest grand duchess "offensive and a terrorist" and complained that her occasionally provocative comments sometimes caused tension in the ranks. Anastasia and her sisters learned how to do their own laundry and assisted the cook in making bread while they were in captivity at the Ipatiev House.
In the summer, the privations of the captivity, including their closer confinement at the Ipatiev House negatively affected the family. According to some accounts, at one point Anastasia became so upset about the locked, painted windows that she opened one to look outside and get fresh air. A sentry reportedly saw her and fired, narrowly missing her. She did not try again. On July 14, 1918, local priests at Yekaterinburg conducted a private church service for the family. They reported that Anastasia and her family, contrary to custom, fell on their knees during the prayer for the dead, and that the girls had become despondent, hopeless, and no longer sang the replies in his service. Noticing this dramatic change in their demeanor since his last visit, one priest told the other, "Something has happened to them in there." But the next day, on July 15, 1918, Anastasia and her sisters appeared in good spirits as they joked and helped move the beds in their shared bedroom so that cleaning women could clean the floors. They helped the women scrub the floors and whispered to them when the guards weren't watching. Anastasia stuck her tongue out at Yakov Yurovsky
Yakov Yurovsky
Yakov Mikhaylovich Yurovsky was an Old Bolshevik best known as the chief executioner of Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II and his family in 1918, during the Russian Civil War.- Early life :...
, the head of the detachment, when he momentarily turned his back and left the room.
Anastasia was executed along with her family by a firing squad
Execution by firing squad
Execution by firing squad, sometimes called fusillading , is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war.Execution by shooting is a fairly old practice...
in the early morning of July 17, 1918. The execution was carried out by forces of the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
secret police under the command of Yurovsky.
Captivity and execution
After the Bolshevik revolutionOctober Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
in October 1917, Russia quickly disintegrated into civil war. Negotiations for the release of the Romanovs between their Bolshevik (commonly referred to as 'Reds') captors and their extended family, many of whom were prominent members of the Royal Houses of Europe, stalled. As the Whites (loyalists still faithful to the Tsar and the principles of autocracy) advanced toward Yekaterinburg the Reds were in a precarious situation. The Reds knew Yekaterinburg would fall to the better manned and equipped White Army
White movement
The White movement and its military arm the White Army - known as the White Guard or the Whites - was a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces.The movement comprised one of the politico-military Russian forces who fought...
. When the Whites reached Yekaterinburg, the Imperial Family had simply disappeared. The most widely accepted account was that the family had been murdered. This was due to an investigation by White Army Investigator Nicholas Sokolov, who came to the conclusion based on items that had belonged to the family being found thrown down a mine shaft
Shaft mining
Shaft mining or shaft sinking refers to the method of excavating a vertical or near-vertical tunnel from the top down, where there is initially no access to the bottom....
at Ganina Yama
Ganina Yama
Ganina Yama was a 9' deep pit in the Four Brothers mine near the village of Koptyaki, 15 km north from Yekaterinburg...
.
The "Yurovsky Note," an account of the event filed by Yurovsky to his Bolshevik superiors following the murders, was found in 1989 and detailed in Edvard Radzinsky's 1992 book The Last Tsar. According to the note, on the night of the murders the family was awakened and told to dress. They were told they were being moved to a new location to ensure their safety in anticipation of the violence that might ensue when the White Army reached Yekaterinburg. Once dressed, the family and the small circle of servants who had remained with them were herded into a small room in the house's sub-basement and told to wait. Alexandra and Alexei sat in chairs provided by guards at the empress' request. After several minutes, the executioners entered the room, led by Yurovsky. Yurovsky quickly informed the Tsar and his family that they were to be executed. The Tsar had time to say only "What?" and turn to his family before he was killed by several bullets to the chest (not, as is commonly stated, to the head; his skull, recovered in 1991, bears no bullet wounds). The Tsar, the empress and two menservants were killed in the first episode of gunfire; Marie, Dr Botkin and the empress' maid Demidova were wounded. Thick smoke had filled the room from so many weapons being fired at close quarters, as well as from plaster dust released from the walls by bullets. To allow the haze to clear, the gunmen left the room for some minutes, leaving all the victims behind. When the gunman returned, Dr Botkin was shot and the Tsarevich Alexei was slaughtered, one gunman repeatedly trying to shoot or stab the boy in the torso. The jewels sewn in his clothes protected him, and finally another gunman fired two shots into his head. Tatiana and Olga were then killed by single bullets to the head.
The last victims, Maria, Anastasia and the maid Demidova, were on the floor beneath the room's one window. As the gunman approached, Maria stood and struggled with Ermakov as he tried to stab her. The jewels in her clothing shielded her, and Ermakov claimed that he killed her with a shot to the head. Ermakov then struggled with Anastasia, failed to stab her, and said he killed her, too, with a shot to the head. Maria's skull shows no trace of bullet wounds and it is unclear how she died. Ermakov was quite drunk during the murders and possibly his shot only creased Maria's scalp, knocking her unconscious and producing considerable blood flow, but not killing her. Then, as the bodies were taken out of the cellar room, two of the grand duchesses showed signs of life. One sat up and screamed, throwing her arm over her head, while the other, bleeding from the mouth, moaned and moved slightly. Since the head wounds inflicted on Olga and Tatiana were instantly fatal, it is likely that Maria, perhaps only unconscious, was the sister who screamed, while Anastasia may still have been able to move and moan. Although Ermakov's archived statement does not say so, he told his wife that Anastasia was finished off with bayonets, while Yurovsky wrote that as the bodies were carried out, one or more of the girls cried out and were clubbed on the back of the head. But again, the back of Maria's skull shows no traces of violence, and Anastasia's burned and fragmented remains, identified in 2009, offer no clues to the cause of her death.
False reports of survival and identification of Romanov remains
Anastasia's supposed survival was one of the celebrated mysteries of the 20th century. Anna AndersonAnna Anderson
Anna Anderson was the best known of several impostors who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia...
, the most notorious Anastasia impostor, first surfaced publicly between 1920 and 1922. She contended that she had feigned death amongst the bodies of her family members and servants, and was able to make her escape with the help of a compassionate guard who rescued her from amongst the corpses after noticing that she was still alive. Her legal battle for recognition from 1938 to 1970 continued a lifelong controversy and was the longest running case ever heard by the German courts where it was officially filed. The final decision of the court was that Anderson had not provided sufficient proof to claim the identity of the grand duchess.
Anderson died in 1984 and her body was cremated. DNA tests were conducted in 1994 on a tissue sample from Anderson located in a hospital and the blood of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is the husband of Elizabeth II. He is the United Kingdom's longest-serving consort and the oldest serving spouse of a reigning British monarch....
, a grandnephew of Empress Alexandra. According to Dr. Gill who conducted the tests, "If you accept that these samples came from Anna Anderson, then Anna Anderson could not be related to Tsar Nicholas
Nicholas II of Russia
Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia, Grand Prince of Finland, and titular King of Poland. His official short title was Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias and he is known as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church.Nicholas II ruled from 1894 until...
or Tsarina Alexandra." Anderson's mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondrial DNA is the DNA located in organelles called mitochondria, structures within eukaryotic cells that convert the chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use, adenosine triphosphate...
was a match with a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska, a missing Polish factory worker. Some supporters of Anderson's claim acknowledged that the DNA tests proving she could not have been the Grand Duchess had "won the day."
Anna Anderson was one of at least ten women who claimed to be Anastasia. Some other lesser known claimants were Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilyeva and Eugenia Smith
Eugenia Smith
Eugenia Smith, of Chicago, also known as Eugenia Drabek Smetisko, was one of several impostors who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia. She is the author of the Autobiography of HIH Anastasia Nicholaevna of Russia , in which she claimed to be Anastasia...
. Two young women claiming to be Anastasia and her sister Maria were taken in by a priest in the Ural Mountains
Ural Mountains
The Ural Mountains , or simply the Urals, are a mountain range that runs approximately from north to south through western Russia, from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Ural River and northwestern Kazakhstan. Their eastern side is usually considered the natural boundary between Europe and Asia...
in 1919 where they lived as nuns until their deaths in 1964. They were buried under the names Anastasia and Maria Nikolaevna.
Rumors of Anastasia's survival were embellished with various contemporary reports of trains and houses being searched for 'Anastasia Romanov' by Bolshevik soldiers and secret police. When she was briefly imprisoned at Perm
Perm
Perm is a city and the administrative center of Perm Krai, Russia, located on the banks of the Kama River, in the European part of Russia near the Ural Mountains. From 1940 to 1957 it was named Molotov ....
in 1918, Princess Helena Petrovna
Princess Helen of Serbia
Jelena Karađorđević or Princess Helen of Serbia was the daughter of King Peter I of Yugoslavia and his wife Princess Zorka of Montenegro. She was the elder sister of George, Crown Prince of Serbia and Alexander I of Yugoslavia...
, the wife of Anastasia's distant cousin, Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia
Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia
Prince John Constantinovich of Russia , sometimes also known as Prince Ioann, Prince Ivan or Prince Johan, was the eldest son of Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia by his wife Elisaveta Mavrikievna, née Princess Elisabeth of Saxe-Altenburg...
, reported that a guard brought a girl who called herself Anastasia Romanova to her cell and asked if the girl was the daughter of the Tsar. Helena Petrovna said she did not recognize the girl and the guard took her away. Although other witnesses in Perm later reported that they saw Anastasia, her mother Alexandra Fyodorovna and sisters in Perm after the murder, that story is now widely discredited as nothing more than a rumor. Ironically, it now appears that rumors started to hide the fact that the family was dead actually fueled the rumors they were alive. A few days after they had been murdered, the German government sent several telegrams to Russia demanding 'the safety of the princesses of German blood'. Russia had recently signed a peace treaty
Peace treaty
A peace treaty is an agreement between two or more hostile parties, usually countries or governments, that formally ends a state of war between the parties...
with the Germans, and did not want to upset them by letting them know the women were dead, so they told them they had been moved to a safer location. This may well be the source of the 'Perm' stories.
In another incident, eight witnesses reported the recapture of a young woman after an apparent escape attempt in September 1918 at a railway station at Siding 37, northwest of Perm. These witnesses were Maxim Grigoyev, Tatiana Sitnikova and her son Fyodor Sitnikov, Ivan Kuklin and Matrina Kuklina, Vassily Ryabov, Ustinya Varankina, and Dr. Pavel Utkin, a physician who treated the girl after the incident. Some of the witnesses identified the girl as Anastasia when they were shown photographs of the grand duchess by White Russian
White movement
The White movement and its military arm the White Army - known as the White Guard or the Whites - was a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces.The movement comprised one of the politico-military Russian forces who fought...
Army investigators. Utkin also told the White Russian Army investigators that the injured girl, whom he treated at Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
headquarters in Perm, told him, "I am the daughter of the ruler, Anastasia." Utkin obtained a prescription from a pharmacy
Pharmacy
Pharmacy is the health profession that links the health sciences with the chemical sciences and it is charged with ensuring the safe and effective use of pharmaceutical drugs...
for a patient named "N" at the orders of the secret police. White Army investigators later independently located records for the prescription. During the same time period in mid-1918 there were several reports of young people in Russia passing themselves off as Romanov escapees. Boris Soloviev, the husband of Rasputin's daughter Maria
Maria Rasputin
Maria Rasputina, born Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina , was the daughter of the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin and his wife Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina...
, defrauded prominent Russian families by asking for money for a Romanov impostor to escape to China. Soloviev also found young women willing to masquerade as one of the grand duchesses to assist in deceiving the families he had defrauded.
Some biographers' accounts speculated that the opportunity for one or more of the guards to rescue a survivor existed. Yakov Yurovsky demanded that the guards come to his office and turn over items they had stolen following the murder. There was reportedly a span of time when the bodies of the victims were left largely unattended in the truck, in the basement and in the corridor of the house. Some guards who had not participated in the murders and had been sympathetic to the grand duchesses were reportedly left in the basement with the bodies.
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
of the survival of Anastasia and her younger brother Tsarevich Alexei. In 1953, Peter Zamiatkin, who was reportedly a member of the guard of the Russian Imperial Family
Romanov
The House of Romanov was the second and last imperial dynasty to rule over Russia, reigning from 1613 until the February Revolution abolished the crown in 1917...
, told a 16-year-old fellow hospital patient that he had taken Anastasia and Alexei to his birth village near Odessa at the request of the Tsar. After the assassination of the rest of the royal family, Zamiatkin reportedly escaped with the children via ship, sailing from Odessa to Alexandria. The alleged survivors, "Anastasia" and "Alexei," reportedly lived out their lives under assumed names in the Bulgarian town of Gabarevo near Kazanlak
Kazanlak
Kazanlak, formerly Kazanlık is a Bulgarian town in Stara Zagora Province, located in the middle of the plain of the same name, at the foot of the Balkan mountain range, at the eastern end of the Rose Valley...
. The Bulgarian Anastasia claimant called herself Eleonora Albertovna Kruger
Eleonora Kruger
Eleonora Albertova Krüger was a woman who lived in the village of Gabarevo, Bulgaria in the twentieth century. Some have speculated that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia....
and died in 1954.
Romanov graves
In 1991, the presumed burial site of the Imperial family and their servants was excavated in the woods outside YekaterinburgYekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg is a major city in the central part of Russia, the administrative center of Sverdlovsk Oblast. Situated on the eastern side of the Ural mountain range, it is the main industrial and cultural center of the Urals Federal District with a population of 1,350,136 , making it Russia's...
. The grave had been found nearly a decade earlier, but was kept hidden by its discoverers from the Communists who still ruled Russia when the grave was originally found. The grave only held nine of the expected eleven sets of remains. DNA and skeletal analysis matched these remains to Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of the four Grand Duchesses (Olga, Tatiana and Maria). The other remains, with unrelated DNA, correspond to the family's doctor (Yevgeny Botkin
Eugene Botkin
Yevgeny Sergeyevich Botkin was the court physician for Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra and, while in exile with the family, sometimes treated the hemophilia-related complications of the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia.Botkin went into exile with the Romanovs following the Russian...
), their valet (Alexei Trupp), their cook (Ivan Kharitonov
Ivan Kharitonov
Ivan Mikhailovich Kharitonov, , was a cook at the court of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. He followed the Romanov family into internal exile following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and was executed with them by the Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918 at Ekaterinburg.Like the Romanovs, Kharitonov was...
) and Alexandra's maid (Anna Demidova
Anna Demidova
Anna Stepanovna Demidova was a maid in the service of Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. She acquired posthumous fame because she was murdered alongside her employer in 1918....
). The late forensic expert Dr. William Maples
William R. Maples
* Maples, William R. and Browning, Michael . Dead Men Do Tell Tales. Existe versión en español "Los muertos también hablan" -External links:* * *...
decided that the Tsarevitch Alexei and Anastasia's bodies were missing from the family's grave. Russian scientists contested this conclusion, however, claiming that it was the body of Maria that was missing. The Russians identified Anastasia by using a computer program
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...
to compare photos of the youngest grand duchess with the skulls of the victims from the mass grave. They estimated the height and width of the skulls where pieces of bone were missing. American scientists found this method inexact.
American scientists thought the missing body to be Anastasia because none of the female skeletons showed the evidence of immaturity, such as an immature collarbone, undescended wisdom teeth, or immature vertebrae in the back, that they would have expected to find in a seventeen year old. In 1998, when the remains of the Imperial Family were finally interred, a body measuring approximately 5'7" was buried under the name of Anastasia. Photographs taken of her standing beside her three sisters up until six months before the murders demonstrate that Anastasia was several inches shorter than all of them.
The account of the "Yurovsky Note" indicated that two of the bodies were removed from the main grave and cremated at an undisclosed area in order to further disguise the burials of the Tsar and his retinue, if the remains were discovered by the Whites, since the body count would not be correct. Searches of the area in subsequent years failed to turn up a cremation site or the remains of the two missing Romanov children. However, on August 23, 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two burned, partial skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg that appeared to match the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs. The archaeologists said the bones are from a boy who was roughly between the ages of ten and thirteen years at the time of his death and of a young woman who was roughly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three years old. Anastasia was seventeen years and one month old at the time of the assassination, while her sister Maria was nineteen years, one month old and her brother Alexei was two weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday. Anastasia's elder sisters Olga and Tatiana were twenty-two and twenty-one years old respectively at the time of the assassination. Along with the remains of the two bodies, archaeologists found "shards of a container of sulfuric acid
Sulfuric acid
Sulfuric acid is a strong mineral acid with the molecular formula . Its historical name is oil of vitriol. Pure sulfuric acid is a highly corrosive, colorless, viscous liquid. The salts of sulfuric acid are called sulfates...
, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of various caliber." The bones were found using metal detector
Metal detector
A metal detector is a device which responds to metal that may not be readily apparent.The simplest form of a metal detector consists of an oscillator producing an alternating current that passes through a coil producing an alternating magnetic field...
s and metal rods as probes.
DNA testing by multiple international laboratories such as the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory
Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory
The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory is a forensics laboratory specializing in DNA profiling run by the United States Armed Forces and located in Rockville, Maryland....
and Innsbruck Medical University
Innsbruck Medical University
The Innsbruck Medical University is a university in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria. It used to be one of the fours historical faculties of the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck but became an independent university in 2004.- History :The medical tradition dates back long before the foundation of...
confirmed that the remains belong to the Tsarevich Alexei and to one of his sisters, proving conclusively that all family members, including Anastasia, died in 1918. The parents and all five children are now accounted for, and each has his or her own unique DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
profile. However, in the article Dr. Michael D. Coble (et al.) wrote (see ”Supporting Information”, in comments to Fig. S1):
The identification of either Maria or Anastasia was not possible by DNA analysis alone.
Also, in the section "Discussion" of this article:
It should be mentioned that a well publicized debate over which daughter, Maria (according to Russian experts) or Anastasia (according to US experts), has been recovered from the second grave cannot be settled based upon the DNA results reported here. In the absence of a DNA reference from each sister, we can only conclusively identify Alexei – the only son of Nicholas and Alexandra.
Sainthood
- For more information, see Canonization of the Romanovs
In 2000, Anastasia and her family were canonized
Canonization
Canonization is the act by which a Christian church declares a deceased person to be a saint, upon which declaration the person is included in the canon, or list, of recognized saints. Originally, individuals were recognized as saints without any formal process...
as passion bearer
Passion bearer
In Orthodox Christianity, a passion bearer is a person who faces his or her death in a Christ-like manner. Unlike martyrs, passion-bearers are not explicitly killed for their faith, though they hold to that faith with piety and true love of God...
s by the Russian Orthodox Church
Russian Orthodox Church
The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...
. The family had previously been canonized in 1981 by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as holy martyrs
Martyr
A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce, or accept, a belief or cause, usually religious.-Meaning:...
. The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were finally interred in the St. Catherine Chapel at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral
Peter and Paul Cathedral
The Peter and Paul Cathedral is a Russian Orthodox cathedral located inside the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, Russia. It is the first and oldest landmark in St. Petersburg, built between 1712 and 1733 on Zayachy Island along the Neva River. Both the cathedral and the fortress were...
in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, eighty years after they were murdered.
Influence on culture
The purported survival of Anastasia has been the subject of both theatrical and made-for-televisionTelevision movie
A television film is a feature film that is a television program produced for and originally distributed by a television network, in contrast to...
films. The earliest, made in 1928, was called Clothes Make the Woman. The story followed a woman who turns up to play the part of a rescued Anastasia for a Hollywood film, and ends up being recognized by the Russian soldier who originally rescued her from her would-be assassins.
The most famous is probably the highly fictionalized 1956 Anastasia starring Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films. She won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and the Tony Award for Best Actress. She is ranked as the fourth greatest female star of American cinema of all time by the American Film Institute...
as Anna Anderson
Anna Anderson
Anna Anderson was the best known of several impostors who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia...
, Yul Brynner
Yul Brynner
Yul Brynner was a Russian-born actor of stage and film. He was best known for his portrayal of Mongkut, king of Siam, in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for the film version; he also played the role more than 4,500 times on...
as General Bounine (a fictional character
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
based on several actual men), and Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes Brown was an American actress whose career spanned almost 70 years. She eventually garnered the nickname "First Lady of the American Theatre" and was one of twelve people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award...
as the Dowager Empress Marie, Anastasia's paternal grandmother. The film tells the story of a woman from an asylum who appears in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1928 and is captured by several Russian émigrés who feed her information so that they can fool Anastasia's grandmother into thinking Anderson actually is her granddaughter in order to obtain a Tsarist fortune. As time goes by they begin to suspect that this "Madame A. Anderson" really is the missing Grand Duchess.
The story served as the basis for the short-lived 1965 musical Anya
Anya (musical)
Anya is a musical with a book by George Abbott and Guy Bolton and music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest. As they had done with Song of Norway and Kismet , Wright and Forrest developed the musical score using themes written by a classical composer, in this case Sergei...
.
In 1986, NBC broadcast a mini-series
Miniseries
A miniseries , in a serial storytelling medium, is a television show production which tells a story in a limited number of episodes. The exact number is open to interpretation; however, they are usually limited to fewer than a whole season. The term "miniseries" is generally a North American term...
loosely based on a book published in 1983 by Peter Kurth called Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson. The movie, Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna
Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna
Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna is a 1986 TV movie, starring Amy Irving, Olivia de Havilland and Jan Niklas. The film was loosely based on the story of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia and the novel The Riddle of Anna Anderson by Peter Kurth. It was Christian Bale's first film and Rex...
was a two-part series which began with the young Anastasia Nicholaievna and her family being sent to Yekaterinburg, where they are executed by Bolshevik soldiers. The story then moves to 1923, and while taking great liberties, fictitiously follows the claims of the woman known as Anna Anderson. Amy Irving
Amy Irving
Amy Davis Irving is an American actress, known for her roles in the films Crossing Delancey, The Fury, Carrie, and Yentl as well as acclaimed roles on Broadway and Off-Broadway. She has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, and has won an Obie award...
portrays the adult Anna Anderson.
The most recent film is 1997's Anastasia
Anastasia (1997 film)
Anastasia is a 1997 American animated musical film produced and directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. It was the first feature film to be released by Fox Animation Studios....
, an animated musical adaptation of the story of Anastasia's fictional escape from Russia and her subsequent quest for recognition. The film took greater liberties with historical fact than the 1956 film of the same name.
In The Romanov Prophecy,
Romanov prophecy
The Romanov Prophecy is 2004 a novel written by Steve Berry and is an amalgam of fact and fiction. The novel relates the adventures of Miles Lord, an African-American lawyer in post-communist Russia on finding the descendants of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia and Tsarevich Alexei of...
a 2004 novel by Steve Berry, the wounded Anastasia and Alexei are rescued by guards and spirited away to the United States, where they live under assumed names with a family of loyalists paid by Felix Yusupov
Felix Yusupov
Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov, Count Sumarokov-Elston , was best known for participating in the murder of Grigori Rasputin, the faith healer who was said to have influenced decisions of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsaritsa Alexandra Feodorovna.-Biography:...
. In the novel, both children died of illnesses in the 1920s, but not before Alexei married and fathered a son.
Ancestry
External links
- The Murder of Russia's Imperial Family Nicolay Sokolov Investigation of the murder of the Romanov Imperial FamilyRoyal familyA royal family is the extended family of a king or queen regnant. The term imperial family appropriately describes the extended family of an emperor or empress, while the terms "ducal family", "grand ducal family" or "princely family" are more appropriate to describe the relatives of a reigning...
in 1918, in Russian. - FrozenTears.org A media library of the last Imperial family
- Anastasia Information A web site dealing with the controversy surrounding Anastasia's death.
- Article by Peter Kurth — author of Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson discusses his doubts that Anna Anderson was the factory worker Franziska Schanzkowska.
- The Glorification of the Royal Family
- Anastasia and Anna Anderson A website with an overview of Anastasia's life and legend and a brief discussion of Anna Anderson's tale along with links to various books on the subject.
- Hemophilia A (Factor VIII Deficiency)
- Could the Bulgarian mountain village of Gabarevo be the last refuge of the lost Romanov Princess?