The legend of the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II is fairly well-known – helped in no small part by the 20th Century Fox film released in 1997. The truth, however, is less well-known – which is why I feel compelled to write this to set the record straight.
As a bit of background, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna was born on June 18, 1901 – the youngest daughter and second youngest child of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna. She had three elder sisters – Olga, Maria and Tatiana – and one younger brother, the jewel in her father’s Imperial crown – Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich.
Raised fairly simply she was described as energetic and vivacious with strawberry-blonde hair and blue eyes and extraordinary personal charm. Like other members of her family, she suffered from symptoms of ill health and is believed to have been a carrier of the haemophilia gene – a disease that affected her brother Alexei so severely it is debated it augmented the revolutionary sentiment in Russia.
Alexei’s condition was so debilitating that is arguably led to his and Anastasia’s mother – and consequently their father – becoming increasingly reliant on and devoted to the “holy man” Grigori Rasputin.
Shortly after Rasputin’s murder, she and her family were placed under house arrested in February 1917 and her father was forced to abdicate in March of that year.
On July 17, 1918, Anastasia – along with her family and the few servants who had chosen to follow them into captivity – were roused from their beds in Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg and told to dress with the initial information that they were being moved to a new location. They were taken down to the house’s sub-basement and it was only then that they were told they had been sentenced to death and were to be shot. The Tsar was the first to die in the onslaught of bullets and bayonets that followed and when the smoke finally cleared there was not a single moving soul in the room.
Rumours of Anastasia’s possible survival stemmed partly from the fact that she and her sisters were known to have sewn precious jewels into the lining of their clothes to keep them hidden from any greedy guards and these supposedly acted as a kind of bulletproof shield against the firing squad. The guard who found the still-living young woman supposedly took pity on her and helped her escape. This theory was fuelled by Russia actively denying the bloodbath; claiming to their new German allies that the girls had been moved to a safer location. Even her name provided cause for hope as Anastasia literally means 'Resurrection. One who will be reborn'.
In addition to this, when the remains of the bodies of the Romanov family were found in 1991, the bodies of Anastasia, and also of Alexei, were not among those uncovered – perpetuating the possibility that Anastasia survived.
Over the years (and decades), numerous impostors came forward claiming to be the long-lost Grand Duchess – the most famous of which was a woman known by the name of Anna Anderson.
Anderson was originally found in an insane asylum going by the name of Fraulein Unbekannt (or Miss Unknown) – this changed to Tschaikovsky and then to Anderson. From around 1921/22 she began claiming that she was Anastasia – a claim widely dismissed by many of the Imperial royal family but believed by enough significant people – including the daughter of the family doctor (who was killed with the family in 1917) and a cousin of the Duchess – to give it momentum
This belief was apparently due to a similarity in appearance and was enough to provoke a trip to America for ‘Anastasia’. The increasing amount of fame and public interest that surrounded her was interrupted sporadically with bouts of mental illness – which at one point meant a return to incarceration in an asylum in Germany.
In 1938, she began a lawsuit to claim what was rightfully due to her as the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. This lawsuit was to become the longest-running in German history and ended in 1970 with the decision that Anna Anderson had been unable to prove her identity as the ‘lost’ Duchess.
Anna Anderson died in 1984 – having lived out her last 20 years in America as Mrs Anastasia Manahan – and her body was cremated which supposedly ended the debate or even the possibility of resolving the mystery of her true identity.
However, a clue to the truth behind Ms. Anderson was uncovered as far back as 1927 when a private investigation – funded by the brother of the late Tsarina, Ernst Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse – identified Anderson as Franziska Schanzkowska – a Polish factory worker with a history of mental illness following an accident in the munitions factory where she worked. She was even identified as such by Franziska’s brother, Felix – yet the deception continued.
This revelation was further and conclusively proven in 1994 when DNA tests conducted on a tissue sample from Anna Anderson ascertained that she was not and could not be related to the Tsar or the Tsarina.
No other impostors have ever been able to conclusively been able to prove they are Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna.
The reason for this is simple - and this is where we get to the crunch because, I hate to have to break it to all those who, like me, love a good romance story or a happily ever after but, Anastasia DID NOT SURVIVE.
Anastasia – like all her other siblings, her parents, and the devoted family servants – died in the hailstorm of bullets they were subjected to in that basement in Yekaterinburg in 1918. There were no survivors.
Despite the supposed absence of her remains in the discovery in 1991, in 2007 a further discovery was made of 2 more sets of remains which provided initial suggestive proof that the myth of Anastasia’s survival was solely that – a myth.
The bodies roughly matched the same ages that Grand Duchess Anastasia and Tsarevich Alexei would have been in 1918 and DNA testing conducted by several laboratories confirmed that the remains did indeed belong the Romanov bloodline – identifying them as the until-then missing remains of the Tsarevich and the last unaccounted daughter of the Tsar.
Thus all members of the family were accounted for. The remains of all the victims of that terrible onslaught had finally been found. It had taken 89 years but the spirit of Anastasia could finally be laid to rest – and with it any speculation that she had somehow escaped.
Sad and regrettable as her story may be, it has thus been undeniably proven. Anastasia – the youngest Grand Duchess in the House of Romanov and youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandrina – died on July 17, 1918.
The initial protection that the jewels in her dress may have afforded her, did not protect her from any follow-up inspection that may have carried out on that room’s grisly cargo and there was no kindly soldier who took pity on her and helped her escape. All impostors to her name were just that – impostors – and all work that has speculated as to her survival is fiction.
Her parents and three sisters remains were finally interred in St Peter and St Paul Cathedral on July 17, 1998 and it was planned that Anastasia’s remains – along with those of Alexei – would be interred beside them on October 18, 2015. However, legal wrangling which questioned the identity of the remains prevented this from happening and, while further testing provided additional confirmation of the initial analysis of the remains, they have yet to find their final resting place. So although her body has yet to be laid to rest, her story – once and for all – can be.
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia
June 18 1901 – July 17, 1918
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