Anastasia as a child
Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova was born in June 1901, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna. She was the youngest of four sisters and was elder to a brother, Alexei Nicholaevich. In February 1917, following the outbreak of the Russian revolution, the Tsar abdicated and the imperial family was put under house arrest in Tsarskoye Selo, outside St. Petersburg. Later on that same year, the family was moved to Tobolsk in Siberia. Once the Bolsheviks gained power, the Romanovs were moved to Yekaterinburg in Central Russia, where they lived for 78 days at Ipatiev House.
The murder at Ipatiev House
Room where the family was executed
The Whites, a faction opposed to the Bolsheviks, was advancing on Yekaterinburg and the Bolsheviks feared they would release the Romanovs. As a result, in the early morning of July 17, 1918, the imperial family was executed by firing squad in the cellar of Ipatiev House and their bodies disposed of (as confirmed by a note written by the executioner, Yakov Mikhaylovich Yurovsky, to his Bolshevik superiors). Once the Whites took over the city, the family had disappeared. White Army investigators concluded the Romanovs had been murdered, but they never found the bodies.
Anna Anderson
Anastasia’s possible survival
The 1920s were characterized by a series of reports about Anastasia’s survival, which gave rise to one of the most controversial mysteries of the 20th century. Although there were up to ten different women claiming to be the missing Anastasia, Anna Anderson was by far the most notorious. She surfaced in the spring of 1922, claiming to be the Duchess who had escaped the shooting and was smuggled out the grave by a sympathetic guard. In 1927, the Tsarina’s brother, Ernst Ludwig, the Granduke of Hesse, undertook a private investigation and concluded that Anderson was a Polish factory worker called Franziska Schanzkowska, with a history of mental illness (she had been hospitalized during WWI when the factory she was working on was hit by a bomb and she had lost consciousness).
In 1928, Anderson moved to the United States, where she received support from Gleb Botkin, son of Dr. Eugene Botkin, the physician who was killed with the Romanovs at Yekaterinburg. Botkin set up a company to oversee legal attempts to retrieve any of the Tsar’s estates outside of Russia for Anderson. As a result, in October 1928, twelve of the surviving relatives of Nicholas II signed a declaration denouncing Anderson as an impostor. Litigation continued through WWII and proceedings were only closed in 1969, when the German courts (Anderson was a citizen of Berlin originally) ruled the case was inconclusive as Anderson had not provided enough evidence to support her claim.
Romanovs remains found in mass grave
The bodies are found: DNA Testing proves their identity
In the late 1970s Russian geologist Alexander Avdonin, located the mass grave containing the remains of five out of the seven members of the imperial family and four of their servants. However, he only revealed the location of the grave after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, the bodies were exhumed and subjected to forensic investigation, including DNA testing. Dr. Peter Gill (Forensic Science Service) and Russian geneticist, Dr. Pavel Ivanov, undertook nuclear DNA testing of five SRT markers and confirmed the sex of the skeletons as well as a familial relationship among five of the eight skeletons found. They also ran DNA testing of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, whose maternal grandmother was the Tsarina’s sister, and found a familial relationship between four of the skeletons and Prince Philip, confirming that at least four of the bodies found were those of the Tsarina and of three of her daughters. The Duke of Fife and Princess Xenia Cheremeteff Sfiri were used to successfully reassociate the remains of the Tsar (both are maternal relatives). Despite these findings, skeptics argued that the absence of Alexei’s body and of that of one of his sisters proved that the mass grave was not that of the imperial family.
Anna Anderson was not Anastasia Romanov
In 2007, amateur archeologists found some bone remains in the proximity of the first mass grave. An official archeological excavation followed under Dr. Sergei Pogorelov, Deputy Director of the Sverdlovsk Region’s Archaeological Institute, which recovered 44 bone fragments. Russian and US anthropologists studied the remains and concluded that they belonged to at least two people, one of whom was a female, based on sciatiatic bone dimensions. Three silver amalgam fillings found on the crowns of two molars recovered from the grave suggested that at least one person was of an aristocratic status.
In late 2007, independent DNA testing was conducted on the remains of the second grave. According to Michael Coble, Loreille OM, Wadhams MJ, Edson SM, Maynard K, et al, the DNA analysis of all three genetic systems confirms that the samples tested from the second grave are one female and one male child of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra, solving the mystery of the missing Romanov children, who had never unfortunately escaped execution.
Boris Yeltin pays his respect at the Tsar's funeral
In 2007, DNA testing was also conducted on sample tissue of Anna Anderson’s intestine which had been removed during her operation in 1979, and which had been stored at Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. The results were negative: Anna Anderson’s DNA did not match either that of Prince Philip or any of the samples found in Russia, proving that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia Romanov. The sample did match DNA provided by Karl Maucher, a grandson of Franziska Schanzkowska’s sister, confirming that Karl Maucher and Anna Anderson were related and suggesting that Anderson was, after all, Franziska Schanzkowska.
The final DNA report on the Romanov remains can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0004838
This post is dedicated to Enzo Manfredi Consolo.
