JOURNEY TO THE PAST

100 Years of Anna Anderson and the Anastasia Phenomenon

The story of a fallen empire, a hidden gravesite, and the enigmatic woman behind one of the greatest mysteries of our time.

 On the snow covered night of February 27, exactly a century ago this year, a young  woman attempted to commit suicide by jumping off the Bendlerbrücke bridge into the Landwehr  Canal in Berlin. The young woman was rescued by a police sergeant and admitted to the  Elisabeth Hospital for medical evaluation. Days later, she was passed to the mental hospital in  nearby Dalldorf, under the name “Fräulein Unbekannt” (“Miss Unknown”). She remembered  nothing of what people wanted to hear about that fateful night in Ekaterinberg. She had no  recollection of drunken men armed with pistols. No memory of damp cellars and gunshots— or  corsets lined with priceless jewels.  

 All she could say was that she was there.  

 For nearly eighty years, this is all Anna Anderson, her supporters, and the world would  come to believe.  

 The greatest mystery of the twentieth century began at midnight on July 17, 1918. Dr.  Eugene Botkin, private physician to Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family, was told to  awaken the dethroned Tsar, his wife (Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna), their four daughters  (Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia), and their son, former heir to the Russian  throne, Tsarevich Alexei. The family dressed, packed their few possessions into suitcases, and  were marched into a windowless basement, where they awaited instruction.  

 Minutes later, a group of men, led by local leader of the revolution, Yakov Yurovksy,  entered and read aloud an order given directly from the Bolshevik-run Ural Executive  Committee:  

“Nikolai Alexandrovich, in view of the fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on  Soviet Russia, the Ural Executive Committee has decided to execute you.”  

 The Tsar was confused. Yurovksy repeated himself. Within seconds the air was filled with  bullets, gunpowder, and screams.  

 Eye witness accounts from the executioners would detail the desperate screams of the  Tsarina and her daughters as they watched their patriarch killed with a bullet to the forehead.  Meanwhile, bullets ricocheted off of the priceless jewels the Grand Duchesses and the Tsarina  had sewn into their corsets.  

 Surrounded by smoke, Yurovsky ordered his men out of the room. After several minutes  of vomiting in the hallway from inhaling all their gun powder, Yurovsky and his men reentered  the basement and reassessed the situation. The Tsar had been killed instantly. Doctor Botkin lay  dead— hit by one bullet in in the abdomen and another in the head.  

 The rest of the room was very much alive.  

 Drunk and enraged, Yurovsky shot at the Tsarevich. After five bullets, the young prince  fell to the floor— bayoneted and shot twice in the head for good measure. Meanwhile, all four  Grand Duchesses lay in terror on the ground. Olga and Tatiana were finished off with bullets to  the head and bayonets to the rest of their bodies. The youngest and bravest of the Romanov  children, Anastasia, backed herself into a corner and was reported to be the only one to fight back— the jewels sewn into her corset preventing an assassin’s bayonet from stabbing her. Peter  Ermakov then shot her in the head— or, so he claimed.  

 In the end, the last to be killed had been the Romanov’s maid, Anna Demidova. Having  no jewels to protect her, she was finished off with a bayonet. The looted corpses were strewn  throughout the basement, the corridor leading to it, and the surrounding woods outside.  Over the next seventy-two hours, thick mud, incompetent gravediggers, broken legs, and faulty  engines made for several failed missions to dispose of the corpses. With conflicting accounts  from Yurovsky and Ermakov, both of whom were intoxicated at the time of the murder, details  from the rest of the night remain blurred— nothing more than the attempts of two egomaniacs to  outdo the other. Both men claimed that they were the one to have fatally shot the Tsar. Ermakov  in fact confessed in a deathbed interview to have “pitched the ashes [of the Tsar] into the air…  [catching] them like dust and carrying them across the woods and fields.” A document made  public in 1989 known as “The Yurovsky Note” details this gruesome process in detail.   Moreover, several executioners claimed that either Maria or Anastasia was still alive at  the end of the onslaught, with “blood coming from her mouth; strange, guttural noises [coming]  from her.” Former guards Anatoly Yakimov and Feodor Gorshkov later maintained that Anastasia  had survived, despite the fact that neither were part of the firing squad. Gorshkov also said he  was the one who shot Maria and Anastasia in the head, but upon reconstructing their corpses in  the 1990’s, scientists found the only bullet wound in Maria to be in her thigh. According to  Yakimov and Gorshkov’s accounts, Anastasia, had no bullet wounds and was still alive when the  bodies were taken out of the room. Ermakov’s wife however, claimed that Maria and Anastasia  were both clubbed to death. Adding to the confusion, their testimonies are reported to have disappeared as a result of Henry Ford’s own tampering. He was said to have obtained and  intentionally misplaced written reports of the execution as part of an anti-semitic conspiracy.   Regardless of who was telling the truth, rumors that one of the Grand Duchesses had  survived the massacre at Ekaterinberg swirled throughout the Russian countryside. Many were  started as a means to keep the murders a secret from the public. The new Russian government  did not wish to upset their newest ally, Germany, by revealing they had just killed the German born Tsarina. Meanwhile, dozens of Russian aristocrats fleeing the country pretended to be  Romanovs on their papers, sparking intense fear among those loyal to the Bolsheviks.   The location of the Tsar, his family, and his servants remained unknown for over seventy  years. Some believed they were still alive in secret. Others believed they had been completely  burned to dust. The myth of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, youngest daughter of Tsar  Nicholas II, had survived the Russian Revolution however, begins with Anna Anderson.

 Two years after the initial massacre, a fellow patient of Fräulein Unbekannt, Clara  Peuthert, claimed the still unidentified patient was the Grand Duchess Tatiana Romanov— the  second eldest daughter of the Tsar. When this news came to the attention of Captain Nicholas  von Schwabe, a Russian refugee and former acquaintance of the royal family, he visited the  asylum and confirmed Peuthert’s suspicion. Former lady-in-waiting to the Tsarina, Baroness  Sophie Buxhoeveden however, proclaimed Fräulein Unbekkant “too short for Tatiana” and  dismissed the claim entirely— especially after being told the young woman was too ill to see her.  Buxhoeveden knew the Romanovs were dead and the Bolsheviks had taken over for good. 

Anything else was nothing but the speculations of a mental patient and those who longed for the  return of the opulent world of imperial Russia.  

 In the meantime, Schwabe, an active member of The Supreme Monarchist Council,  visited Anna numerous times in Dalldorf after Tolstoy’s claim. One fateful day, after many  fruitless attempts, Schwabe managed to scribble a note to the young woman on a page of a bible.  Anna took it, tore it up, and said that she was not Tatiana (as Schwabe and others believed she  was), but Anastasia.  

 By May of 1922, the unknown woman began referring to herself as Anna (using “Anna”  as a short form of “Anastasia”) and was given shelter in the home of Baron Arthur von Kleist— a  Russian émigré in Berlin who had been the police chief in Russian Poland during the imperial  era. According to reports from many of his contemporaries, his intentions in getting close to  Anna was to be in the good favor of the Russian royal family should the White Army seize  power. Baron von Kleist would later be charged with war crimes and spend the rest of his life in  a Soviet Prison. Other Russian big-wigs who came to support Anna were Schwabe and Zinaida  Tolstoy— the latter of whom tried to use her influence to bring Anna into favor with other non Russian royals and nobility.  

 All Tolstoy had to do was look into the young woman’s eyes to know she was the  daughter of the Tsar. Tolstoy, a member of The Supreme Monarchist Council— an imperial  Russian loyalist organization— reported back to the council that one of the daughters was alive.   European nobility remained polarized on the issue of Anna. Two European royals who  were unconvinced were Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine, Anastasia’s aunt, and the Crown  Princess Cecilie of Prussia. Whether it was the fear of her true identity being uncovered or general anxiety remains unclear— but Anna remained terrified of the Princess Cecilie and the  two never met face to face. Prince Felix Yusopov, who had been a prominent figure in the  assassination of Grigory Rasputin, also declared that Anna was a mere imposter. Tatiana Melnik,  the daughter of Dr. Botkin, who was murdered alongside the Romanov family in the cellar at  Ekaterinberg, was more trusting. Melnik wrote:  

“Her attitude is childlike, and altogether she cannot be reckoned with as a responsible adult, but  must be led and directed like a child. She has not only forgotten languages, but has in general  lost the power of accurate narration… even the simplest stories she tells incoherently and  incorrectly; they are really only words strung together in impossibly ungrammatical German…  Her defect is obviously in her memory and eyesight.”  

 Melnik would eventually chalk all the inconsistencies in Anna’s narrative to the severe  psychological trauma experienced during the Revolution and slowly began to coach Anna on  royal etiquette and history— the untamed mental patient now groomed to pass as royalty like an  eastern European Eliza Doolittle. Meanwhile, at the home of Baron von Kleist, Anna grew ill and  the Kleist family doctor began injecting her with morphine. In between morphine induced hazes,  Zinaida Tolstoy took advantage of Anna’s altered state to get the paranoid Anna to reveal the  frightening details of the Tsar’s murder. Frightful of the stories she told, some of which included  being raped by the Bolsheviks, the Russian loyalists who frequented Kleist’s parlor began to  dismiss Anna entirely.  

 By 1927, the story of Anna Anderson reached a fever-pitch. In the United States, largely  due to the meddling of Gleb Botkin, the eccentric son of Dr. Botkin, the story gained significant  media attention. Princess Xenia Leeds, a distant cousin of Anastasia’s arranged for Anna to travel  to the United States, where she lived with her husband. En route to the United States, Anna made  quite the impression in Paris where she meet the Tsar’s first cousin Grand Duke Andrei Vladimrovich of Russia, who believed Anna to be the real Anastasia— calling their meeting “an  unshakeable recognition.” While Vladimrovich would grow to recant his approval, his initial  belief would validate Anna’s story for many.  

 Despite this impression, twelve of the Tsar’s closest living family members met in  October 1928 at the funeral of the Tsar’s beloved mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna — who counted Anastasia as her favorite grandchild. There, sheltered behind the closed doors  that the family loved to hide behind their subjects from, the family signed a legal document  asserting that “Anna Tchaikovsky” was nothing but a mere imposter. The document, known as  “The Copenhagen Statement” ensured that Anna would never get a single fraction of the vast  Romanov fortune.  

 Back in the U.S, Anna’s mental state began to deteriorate. Snubbed by the royal  expatriates of New York’s swanky Fifth Avenue penthouses, Anna killed her pet parakeet and  was later found running around naked on the roof of a Park Avenue apartment building. Until  1931, Anna remained at the Four Winds sanitarium in Westchester, New York before returning to  Germany a vastly changed woman.  

Upon her return to Germany, Anna received a great media frenzy. In fact, her litigation  against a British tabloid, News of the World— which published a story about Anna being a  Romanian actress— was the longest running lawsuit in German history. After keeping the  German legal system in its own version of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, Anna settled in a home on the  outskirts of the Black Forest.  

 Whether Anna intended to draw attention to herself or not became irrelevant. She became  a highly sought after tourist attraction and some former royal allies became frequent visitors. As was the case throughout the 1920’s, many of these big-wigs couldn’t have cared less about  Anna’s wellbeing— they just wanted some sort of memento from the grand imperial heyday.  Regardless of their intent, Anna continued to entertain visitors in the Black Forest until 1968,  when she returned to the United States with Gleb Botkin and settled among the faculty houses at  the University of Virginia. Here, Anna married John “Jack” Manahan, a professor and famous  eccentric. Guests were utterly exasperated by their Grey Gardens-esque lifestyle. The two lived  in a house of squalor and chaos, where cats climbed over mountains of garbage and old  newspapers, while dust and grime collected on furniture.  On February 12, 1984 Anna Anderson succumbed to pneumonia— almost sixty-four  years to the day she was found on the side of the road, an unknown woman on the brink of  notoriety.  

 Over one hundred years after that fateful night in Berlin, the mystery of Anastasia, Grand  Duchess of Russia still lingers in public discourse, despite DNA evidence that concludes that the  beloved Grand Duchess was indeed murdered by the Bolsheviks in a gruesome attack.   Though leading a sad and lonely existence, Anna Anderson’s story has given life to  dozens of plays, films, novels, television series, documentaries, musicals, and even ballets. For  some, the mystery of Anastasia lives on through old news stories and an Academy Award Winning film starring Ingrid Bergman. For younger generations, Anastasia’s story lives on in the  form of the spunky cartoon princess found in 20th Century Fox’s animated musical, Anastasia.  Unfortunately for fans of these works, scientific evidence proves Anna Anderson was not  the Grand Duchess. In 1927, private investigator Martin Knopf determined that Anderson was in fact, Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker. According to Knopf (who had been hired  by the Tsarina’s surviving brother, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse), Schanzkowska had been  working in an arms factory during World War I. Upon learning that her husband was killed in  action, she dropped the grenade she was making, causing it to explode. Schanzkowska was  injured and her foreman was killed.  

 Shell-shocked, Schanzkowska was committed to several asylums. She had been reported  missing in 1920 and her family believed her to be dead. When her brother Felix visited her while  she was under the care of Duke George of Leuchtenberg, he formally declared that she was an  imposter in an affidavit. Years later, the Schanzkowska family would say that Felix knew Anna  Anderson was really his sister, but relented upon seeing her high-class lodgings— knowing that  her life among the royals of Europe would be better than any peasant’s life in Poland.   Any hopes of Anna Anderson truly being Anastasia were dashed in 1991, when the  bodies of the Tsar, Alexandra, and three of their daughters were exhumed from a mass grave near  where the Impatiev House once stood in Ekaterinberg. Based purely on DNA testing and analysis  of several of bone samples, scientists determined the skeletal remains were in fact those of the  Tsar, his family, and two of their servants. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, whose maternal  grandmother Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine was a sister of Alexandra, provided his  own DNA sample. His DNA may have matched those of the remains found in Ekaterinberg, but  still Anna’s story was considered true to many due to the missing remains of one of the Tsar’s  daughters. However, a sample of Anderson’s intestinal tissue, which was saved in  Charlottesville’s Martha Jefferson Hospital after Anderson had bowel surgery in 1977, was  compared to those of the DNA found in the bones. 

The results concluded that Anna Anderson was indeed, not a blood relation of the  Romanov family. Karl Maucher, a man who was related to the Schanzkowska family provided  his DNA, which perfectly matched the intestinal sample from Anderson. Anna’s doubters had  been correct: she was indeed not the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.   Still, even with the lack of a corpse, the mystery of Anastasia continued to thrive— that  is, until August 23, 2007, when a group of Russian archaeologists, announced the discovery of  two partial skeletons at a bonfire site in Ekaterinberg. Both corpses showed signs of severe  burns. The smaller of the two skeletons was deemed to be those of a young boy between the ages  of ten and thirteen. The other larger skeleton was from a young woman in her late teens.  Anastasia Romanov had just turned seventeen at the time of her execution. In addition to the  skeletons, investigators also found remnants of nails, metal, bullets, and containers of sulfuric  acid. DNA testing done at the U.S. Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and in Austria  at Innsbruck Medical University, concluded that the young boy skeleton was that of the  Tsarevich Alexei and the other to that of one of his sisters.  

Despite nearly a century of mystery, all of the Romanovs had indeed perished after being  executed by the Bolsheviks in a cold, dark basement in the remote city of Ekaterinberg.   The question, that lingers then, is: with all this conclusive evidence, why have so many  held on to a fascination with this closed case?  

 There are the obvious answers: the idea of a lost princess, presumed to have survived a  gory execution, ready to reclaim her place among the reviled and revered European royal family.  Add to this the fact that so few details of the execution were unknown for decades and the fact that her given name “Anastasia” means “resurrection,” and any artist has the tools for a perfect  story: a modern fairy tale with real historical roots and a mystery spin.  

But perhaps however, Anna Anderson’s tale represents something more than a perfect  fantasy of a lonely young woman holding on to the possibility that she might be a princess. 

Despite this tragedy, Anderson’s story reflects, to many, the search for one’s identity and finding  their place in this world. We may not believe we are the heir to the Russian throne, but the  human condition forces us to search for belonging and a sense of place— a common theme in  every iteration and adaptation of Anna’s saga. Ultimately, whether in the form of this historical  essay, a book, or a spunky animated princess voiced by Meg Ryan, Anna Anderson’s search for  her own identity will live on for centuries and make Anastasia Romanov among the most famous  and recognizable figures in modern European history.

Sources and References:

Coble, Michael D., Odile M. Oreille, Mark J. Wadhams, Suni M. Edson, Kerry Marnard, Carna E. Meyer, Harald Neiderstätter, Cordula Berger, Burkhard Berger, Anthony B. Falsetti, Peter Gill, Walther Parson, and Louis N. Finelli. “Mystery Solved: The Identification of the Two Missing Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis.” PLoS ONE 4, no. 3 (2009): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652717/. 

Klier, John and Helen Mingay. The Quest for Anastasia. Secaucus: Birch Tree, 1997.

King, Greg and Penny Wilson. The Resurrection of the Romanovs. New York: Wiley, 2011. 

Kurth, Peter. Anastasia: The Life of Anna Anderson. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1985. 

Massie, Robert K. The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. New York: Ballantine, 1995. 

McDowall, Adrian and Gareth Tunley, dir. The Last Czars. 1,6, “The House of Special Purpose.” Aired July 3, 2019, on Netflix, Netflix.com. 

Rappaport, Helen. The Race to Save the Romanovs. New York: St. Martin’s, 2018. 

Rappaport, Helen. The Romanov Sisters. New York: St. Martin’s, 2014.