Anastasia - I

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Anna Anderson in Unterlengenhardt, 1965

The love of my life disappeared around a street corner in Stockholm in the year I turned forty. I had just toured the Vasa warship and was sitting in the embankment café at the Grand Hôtel, overlooking the harbor. He was a few tables away, light-haired, bearded, a little worn, with a thick wool scarf and a cap that made him look like a poet or a playwright. The way we eyed each other, the sly smiles he gave -- I knew he was mine for the taking. I knew it the way you know that some experiences are memories while they’re still going on.

But I had an appointment that day at the Dansmuseet to see papers about Isadora Duncan. He looked back twice as he walked away and I pretended to be sunk in my newspaper. I lost the man I would have stayed with forever. A few days before I had been in Berlin:

February 5, 1993 — My hair is cut now with baldness in mind, not shaved, but shorn all around to an eighth of an inch. I floated through the gray day to Jopp, a stylist, whose salon sits above the Prinz Eisenherz, the gay bookshop here. Paul was with me and I recalled how much easier it is to be charming with another person in tow, how much easier to feel like and even to be an attractive gay man nearing forty. I sat in the chair, talked German, smiled, flirted – I “had my glow on,” as B would say. I remember the days when I would have blown him afterwards as a matter of course – Jopp -- but left his shop for the Berlin streets in winter, still floating, electric, gliding over a surface of stone and ice.

Strange to think that last fall I was in Ekaterinburg. I saw the bones and the pit where the bodies were dumped. And now today at the Bendler Bridge, where A jumped into the Landwehr Canal and began the whole thing. That was also in a February. What did she see when she looked in the water?

I need to talk about her frankly; it would be cheating not to. “A” is Anna Anderson, later Manahan, the woman who said for 60 years that she was Anastasia of Russia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. I stood in the ruins of her life after DNA testing disproved her claim in 1994, at the very moment I landed at Lenox Hill Hospital with my deadly pneumonia. These events weren’t connected unless it happened psychically.

“If that woman was a Polish peasant,” I had declared on TV, “they’ll have to carry me out of here on a stretcher.” But apparently she was, just a girl from East Prussia, Franziska Schanzkowska, a farm and factory worker with delusions of grandeur -- as everyone knows, DNA is infallible. The Anastasia mystery was solved in a second; Anna Anderson was put down for good. It was a blow of such force that it might have killed me too if I hadn’t been dead already.

How can anyone not know this story? How an unknown woman, later called Anna Anderson, surfaced in Berlin in the early 1920s claiming to be the daughter of the Tsar. Her life was the subject of books in all languages; multiple stage plays and movies; two Broadway musicals, an opera, a ballet by Kenneth Macmillan and another by Youri Vàmos, rock lyrics, pop songs, a feature-length, Disney-style cartoon, and, currently, multiple websites and fan pages of varying quality and tone. The cartoon version is the one that will last, unfortunately, involving a looming villain, a handsome savior, and, as I recall, a talking bat. Always there is glamor in these accounts and always, in the end, Anastasia is restored to her position as an imperial princess -- “the Galatea I have fashioned from the mud of the Landwehr Canal,” as one of her backers proclaims in the first staged version of the tale.

It's an impressive achievement for an impostor, after all, much as it owes to wishful thinking. Online, the four daughters of Nicholas II are now worshiped collectively as avatars of innocence and lost potential. “OTMA,” they are called, as if they were personal friends: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, dancing on their father’s yacht or tending to wounded soldiers in World War I, together forever in a vanished world of opulence and grace. In this fantasy Anna Anderson was never welcome. She is despised and deeply resented by both experts and sentimentalists on the Romanov beat. With her brokenness, her open suffering, her defiance and recrimination, she spoils the picture for royalty fans.

My book about Mrs. Anderson is now decades old; it lacks the revelations of the post-Soviet era, but I stand by it to the extent that I know it was sincere. I wrote about her again in Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra, a handsome coffee-table book published a year after the DNA results came in. The editors didn’t want me to cover the Anastasia story but I told them they couldn’t have me without her. In the bright light of science it is routinely asserted that Mrs. Anderson was just one of many “Anastasias” who surfaced in Europe after the murders at Ekaterinburg. That is a lie. She was the only claimant who made it past the door, the only one not greeted with abrupt dismissal and promptly forgotten. To be clear, Anna Anderson is the only reason Anastasia ever became famous. She’s as much a part of Romanov mythology as Rasputin, the “mad monk”:

No other claimant in the long and colorful history of royal pretenders has ever been taken so seriously by so many people or come as close as Mrs. Anderson did to proving her case. Her suit for legal recognition as the daughter of the Tsar occupied the German courts for nearly forty years and ended in a draw in February 1970, when the West German supreme court at Karlsruhe declared the case legally unresolved, “neither established nor refuted.”

In the same ruling the judges affirmed that “the death of Grand Duchess Anastasia at Ekaterinburg cannot be accepted as a conclusively proven historical fact.” Up to that point, before the opening of the Kremlin archives, the German courts had examined more evidence and heard more witnesses on the subject of the murder of the Tsar and his family than any other body in the world. But the DNA has won the hour, and will doubtless stand as the final word on a case that left everyone who came near it, for or against, with a sense of tragedy and persistent, nagging doubts.

I’m looking at her pictures. I have so many of them, hundreds, taken at all ages and angles, all stages of her life. These were the photographs that convinced forensic experts in the 1960s that Anna Anderson and Anastasia were the same person. The ears in particular, individual like fingerprints, were judged to be identical; they had been posed for comparison and the anthropometric measurements never changed even after the DNA results. Height, size, hair color, eye color, all of them squared in the claimant and the princess. Anna Anderson’s feet even bore a congenital deformity that exactly matched Anastasia’s. That the eyes were the same is obvious to anyone who looks – they were a stunning blue, unmissable, “the eyes of the Tsar,” according to witnesses -- and it might be true of the mouth as well if Mrs. Anderson hadn’t lost so many of her teeth at an early age. Her mouth fell in and she normally held a handkerchief against it when she spoke. It was her most recognizable gesture, just as the Emperor of Russia, her supposed father, fiddled constantly with his beard and moustache when talking to people.

I feel myself hardening, drawing back as I write this, waiting for a hive of Romanov nuts to swarm in with their objections and counter-proofs. They can relax. I’m not arguing the case anymore. I discovered early on that no amount of evidence would convince the Opposition – we were the “Anastasians,” they the Opposition -- and honest historians will admit that, before the DNA conclusions, it came down to personal belief. On the evidence available up till then, the decision could have gone either way.

“How shall I tell you who I am?” Anna Anderson asked at the end of her life. “In which way? Can you tell me that? Can you really prove to me who you are?” I sputtered and fumed about the DNA results for much longer than I should have and said many reckless things in the course of letting it go. But finally the spell broke, and I find now that the Romanovs don’t interest me much. I’m more intent on the nature of identity, what it is and what it really means. I don’t argue with science because I’m not a scientist. But I knew Anastasia, Anna Anderson, and I know how fraught with deception and intrigue her story was from the start. I know how contaminated and degraded the bone samples were that were used for DNA comparison and how corrupted, from top to bottom, was the investigation of their uncovering in Russia in the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union collapsed. I’m in the impossible position of knowing that Anna Anderson can’t have been Anastasia and still believing that she was. I also think she deserved to win, if only for bravery and persistence, and in that I’m not alone.

*

Her name means Resurrection – “Anastasia: She who will rise again.” She was with me for 30 years, my genius and shield, my excuse for being, my special thing, my own. The opposition said she was some sort of witch, that her influence over her supporters was such as to blind them to reality. They had not, of course, for the most part, ever met her, or even laid eyes on her -- this was consistent throughout her ordeal. Those who knew her believed her; those who didn't, didn’t.

One thing I do know: in her company there was no “claim,” no pushing herself forward, no demand to be acknowledged as anything at all. “She was herself,” a Romanov cousin remarked, “herself at all times,” and if I’d had a choice I’d have called my book that: Herself at All Times: The Case for Anastasia. But publishing doesn’t work that way.

The truth is I don’t know how to talk about her anymore, how to access the passion I once felt for her cause. Should I go forward or backward, write from the ending or the start? I declared in Anastasia that I had discovered her at age 13, after seeing Ingrid Bergman play her in the movies. It isn’t quite true – the backstory was too long for a preface. One of my early memories, at age seven, is of hearing Pat Boone croon the title song from the Ingrid Bergman film:

Anastasia, tell me who you are.

Are you someone from another star?

It was a love song, track three on the album Pat’s Great Hits. Later I found the complete Anastasia soundtrack at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vermont and played it over and over, heavy, crashing, spuriously “Russian” music by Hollywood composer Alfred Newman. At the end, the singer urges Anastasia to emerge from her mystery and join the human race:

Anastasia, smile away the past!

Anastasia, spring is here at last!

Beautiful stranger, step down from your star.

I only know I love you so, whoever you are.

I saw a woman in a dark dress, a Victorian day gown buttoned to the throat, stepping off an asteroid, a planet like Pluto, and floating down to Earth. It wasn’t the girl Anastasia who captivated me, not the little princess, but this stranger, this person, the claimant Anna Anderson. I wrote to a friend years later, after the DNA experience:

I do believe despite it all, and I'm sure I've told you before about Eggletina, the mysterious lost cousin in Mary Norton’s Borrowers series. She was thought to have been eaten by a cat but later turned up alive and “peculiar,” standing alone in the corner, in the shadows. Was that the start of it? Because it was more than just the story in the book. In London, when I was five or six, I had bought small dolls at Harrods to represent the Borrowers, and I had an Eggletina, about two or three inches tall, who was lost in the woods around Syosset in the summer we came home, and then, some months later, found again under a heap of leaves and returned to me by my cousin Janet. I remember the letter that came: "They found Eggletina!" Immense excitement, mystery, wonder, etc. She arrived wrapped in tissue with her head missing and rusted wires poking out of her legs. It was Eggletina for sure.

But I still can't say how it happened. Why her? Why not another of my curiosities? I’d had a passion for the Pharaohs and ancient Egypt since the age of eight. At nine I went wild over a murder case on the Isles of Shoals that was later the basis for the book and film The Weight of Water. I delved deeply into the records of the Lincoln assassination and later the murder of Fanny Sébastiani, Duchesse de Praslin, in Paris in 1847. That too was sparked by a motion picture, All This and Heaven, Too, a 1940 Warner Brothers epic starring Bette Davis as a timid French governess (seriously), whose chaste love affair with the Duc de Praslin (Charles Boyer) leads the duke to butcher his wife and topples the throne of King Louis-Philippe. The duke later killed himself in prison and the governess, after being held for weeks in the Conciergerie, escaped to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she married Henry Field, a clergyman and the brother of the man who laid the Atlantic telegraph cable.

How I loved that story! I devoured what I could find about it in old magazines and newspaper microfilms. I visited the governess’s grave in Amherst and sent away for a facsimile copy of L'assassinat de la duchesse de Praslin, published from the trial record shortly after the duke’s conviction and suicide. But my French wasn’t good enough then to penetrate the text. All the governess taught me was how to use a library, a gift beyond price.

In 1963 a story appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine under the title, “The Case of a New Anastasia.” This was Eugenia Smith, formerly Smetisko, a woman in Chicago who passed a lie detector test to bolster her claim but otherwise had nothing in common with the Tsar’s daughters, according to a Romanov cousin who was sent to meet her by the magazine. I knew this cousin later and asked her about it.

“It was ridiculous,” this princess said. “She might have been a Bessarabian chambermaid.” She disappeared instantly at any rate, despite her big splash; it was the norm for Romanov wannabes. In a sidebar to the story was a picture of Anna Anderson, taken in Germany’s Black Forest, where she had lived for years in seclusion. This is how I learned who Anastasia was, or might have been, and what may or may not have happened to her.

Does everyone know? How the Tsar’s family was kept prisoner after the Revolution of 1917, first at their palace in Tsarskoe Selo and later in Siberia, surrounded by an ever-dwindling number of servants and attendants, a loyal few who chose to share their fate. Only four people were still with them at the end, on the summer night of July 16-17, 1918, when they were woken from their beds, ordered to dress, brought down to a basement of the house, and shot. On hearing the sentence of execution the Tsar had time to say “What?” before a dozen soldiers opened fire.

It was one of the most brutal murders ever recorded – or not recorded, more exactly. In July 1918 the White Army was advancing on Ekaterinburg and the Bolsheviks, the Reds, needed to evacuate the town. Civil war had broken out. No one kept forensic records and, when the Whites arrived a week later, the Red leaders and the bodies of the imperial family had likewise disappeared. An investigation was ordered and completed in haste in 1919, as the Red Army again took the city. It concluded that all members of the imperial family had died, although their bodies could not be found.

Only decades later, with the Soviet Union on its last legs, did more precise details about the murders emerge. It had been difficult to find enough soldiers who were willing to shoot at the women; the assassins themselves were made sick by the scene; the smoke of revolvers was so thick in the room that no one could see anything; clubs were used to still the grand duchesses, and bayonets – they had worn corsets loaded with jewels and the bullets bounced off of them when the Bolsheviks fired. The soldiers were aghast, unable to fathom it, and the girls stood for some minutes in the smoke, surrounded by bodies and blood. Some of the executioners were drunk. The leader of the band wrote later, from memory:

From my experience I knew when you trust people too much they will not shoot everybody to the death. To complete the job took quite a time. We found out that the girls were alive. I tried to finish them off with a bayonet, but could not succeed. Alexei sat alive and I was shooting him again, aiming at his heart. Nothing came out of it. I had to shoot at his head.

When it was over, the corpses were loaded on trucks and moved through the woodlands around Ekaterinburg for two days and nights as the killers looked for a place to get rid of them. They lay for a time at the bottom of a mineshaft in the forest but were removed when it became plain that the location couldn’t be kept secret. The murderers looked for deeper shafts further in the woods but their trucks broke down and their time ran out. Finally the bodies were just dumped in a freshly dug pit, three feet deep and in full view of the railway line, not carefully hidden at all. But it took the fall of the Soviet Union before its location was disclosed to the world.

When the grave was excavated 70 years later two members of the family were discovered to be missing: the Tsarevitch Alexei and one of his sisters -- Anastasia, according to American forensic experts called in to investigate, or Maria, according to Russian authorities caught with their pants down when the Anastasia legend exploded again in the world press in 1992.

“All the skeletons appear to be too tall to be Anastasia,'' said the leader of the American team. Anastasia was by far the shortest of the grand duchesses; it can be seen in any picture where the girls are together. But it wasn’t just a question of her height. She had just turned 17 at the time of the murders, and the bones of the three other daughters in the grave showed “completed growth,'' signifying clearly that they were the elder sisters. By logical inference, only Anastasia could have been missing from the grave, a revelation the Russian government wasn’t prepared for and couldn’t tolerate. I was there, in Ekaterinburg and Moscow, when the facts were altered to suit the need and Maria became the missing grand duchess by decree, her body supposedly burned to cinders on an open-air bonfire, along with her brother’s. This was nonsense, of course, an impossible task to complete in the hurried circumstances; corpses aren’t easy to dispose of. History has learned many things about the Ekaterinburg murders since the fall of the Soviets but we still don’t know all that happened — or could have happened —in those two days of horror and confusion.¹

In the 7th grade I wrote a school report about Nicholas II; three long pages as they seemed to me then. We were reading books about communism and democracy and about how lucky we were to be living in a free country. I found the last Tsar to be dull as a rock, an opinion that never changed. He had “a weak character,” I reported, and was dominated by his wife, Empress Alexandra, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. A year later I saw Christopher Lee play Rasputin in a cheesy B-movie with Barbara Shelley and then, in the fall of 1966, Ingrid Bergman’s Anastasia aired on television and I was sunk, swept away, and ruined for other things. I have no way to account for it in rational terms.

After that it was all Romanov, all Russia, all Anastasia. My mother was a student at the University of Vermont, finally getting her degree, and I slipped into the library stacks on her card, a tubby 13-year-old with heavy dark glasses and aching, aching dreams. I don’t know if I “believed” her at the beginning – Anna Anderson – or even thought of it that way. But soon enough I was featured in the Sunday newspaper as a boy with an idée fixe.

“For over two years now,” the report began, “when most boys his age were playing ball or skiing” – and it went on from there. I was embarrassed by my passion’s apparent girliness, but nothing could stop me from going forward. I ordered books about the imperial family from second-hand dealers in New York. In those days you could get them for a song, the memoirs of relatives and courtiers and confidants whose names are familiar to any Romanov buff: Pierre Gilliard, French tutor to the Tsar’s children and Anna Anderson’s foremost opponent; Anna Viroubova, Empress Alexandra’s closest friend and conduit to Rasputin; Grand Duke Alexander, the Tsar’s cousin and brother-in-law, a rebel and smart-aleck with a gift for self-promotion; Lili Dehn, another intimate friend of the Empress; and more, the whole raft of imperial survivors who washed up on foreign shores after the Revolution of 1917 and wrote books to make money or defend themselves, usually both. The Tsar’s family would have shut their doors to all of them had they lived to see treason of this kind.

Our Fletcher Library had the ghosted memoirs of the Tsar’s sister Olga and The Real Romanovs by Gleb Botkin, whose father, personal physician to the imperial family, was shot with them in Ekaterinburg. In America Botkin was Anna Anderson’s loudest promoter and through him I learned the outlines of her case: her attempted suicide and discovery in 1920, 18 months after the Ekaterinburg murders; her long hospitalizations in Berlin, where she suffered from “melancholia” and tuberculosis of the bones; her adventures among Russian exiles and meetings with friends and royal relatives of the Tsar’s family; and her days as a socialite in New York after Botkin brought her there in 1928. I found that mainstream historians were happy to use Botkin as a reliable source for facts about private life among the Romanovs but decidedly not when it came to the claimant in exile. The double standard impressed me at once.

Mrs. Anderson’s own “autobiography,” I, Anastasia, published by her attorneys in 1957 and never seen by her, was largely a compilation of testimonies in her support. It brought me further along in the narrative of her life but the voice that speaks for her there is not her own. There were books by royalists and republicans, insiders and bystanders, generals and diplomats, and -- most valuable to me -- the letters of Empress Alexandra, slowly going crazy in World War I under the influence of Rasputin and her own religiomania. The Soviets had published these letters unedited almost immediately after taking power, for reasons known only to them. Otherwise, for the duration of my quest, Romanov archives in Russia were closed. There was no point in going there except as a tourist, and the places most closely associated with the imperial family, playgrounds and palaces, were off-limits entirely.

Alexandra’s was the first raw voice I encountered in the Romanov story, the first that wasn’t crafted and self-serving. Sensual, angry, bewildered, hysterical, and mentally ill by any reckoning – at the end, she was the true Autocrat of all the Russias and one of the few members of the imperial family who really interested me. Another was Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna – the Younger, she is called, to distinguish her from a momentous aunt – whose two volumes of memoirs read like the finest histories and give rare insight into the mind of European royalty before the fall. “And she wrote every word herself!” one of her cousins told me later, shaking her head in wonder. When Robert K. Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra came out in 1967, I was already way ahead of most people on the Romanov front. Great as it is, Massie’s narrative is based entirely on secondary sources in English, many of which I already owned and had read myself by that time.

But 1967 was a year for the Romanovs, the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and a moment for American culture to reflect on what it had wrought. A classmate’s father, Robert V. Daniels, professor of history at the University of Vermont, published Red October at the same time Massie presented the fullest account to date of the life and death of the Tsar’s family. Julie Harris played Anastasia on television that year in an encore of the Broadway play of 1954: Anastasia by Marcelle-Maurette, on which the Bergman film was loosely based and all the animated and singing shows that followed. In this version the heroine, variously called Anna and Anya, is acknowledged as Anastasia by her grandmother, the Dowager Empress, but chooses love over rank and vanishes with her leading man, an ending that felt stupid to me from the start.

In March 1967 Anna Anderson lost her suit for recognition in Germany – rather, she failed to prove her identity to the judges’ satisfaction and the matter was appealed to the West German supreme court. I felt so bad that I sent her a letter in the Black Forest, not knowing her address beyond the name of her village, Unterlengenhardt, and not knowing German or Russian at all. I worked from a pocket dictionary I had bought for the purpose and spelled it out: Я верю тебе – I believe you. There was no answer but many years later I discovered the letter in the boxes of papers she left behind her in 1968, when she suddenly bolted from Germany and married an American professor, John E. Manahan, in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was fifteen.

1. For a full account of the Ekaterinburg murders I recommend especially Greg King and Penny Wilson’s The Fate of the Romanovs (2003), which combines every conceivable detail of the death of the imperial family into a lucid, readable narrative. Full disclosure: the book is dedicated to me.