In 1977, a local Communist party official in the Ural Mountains city of Sverdlovsk got a message from Moscow ordering him to destroy a small mansion, called the Ipatiev house after the pre-Soviet merchant who had owned it. The reason: Russians nostalgic for the days of the tsar were turning the Ipatiev house into a place of pilgrimage.
The job was done. But years later, the official, Boris Yeltsin, now the president of Russia, lamented that “sooner or later, we will be ashamed of this piece of barbarism.”
Yeltsin meant the destruction of the house. But he could have been talking about what happened there on the night of July 16, 1918, when 12 Bolshevik guards, in 20 minutes of wanton shooting and stabbing, killed Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, his tsarina Alexandra, their doctor, three servants and, it seemed, their four daughters and their son.
Then the assassins, in two days and nights of horror and farce, dumped the bodies down a mineshaft, brought them up again, carted them toward another, deeper mine, got stuck in mud and, eventually, burned two of them and buried the rest quickly in a mass grave beside a road. They laid railway ties over the grave, drove a truck over the ties to hide the grave, and fled.
This secrecy and sloppiness accomplished two things.
First, the hiding place worked. No one found the grave for 60 years. The two men who finally found it were too scared to talk about it for another 11 years.
Second, the panicked burial and reburial, the fire, the confusion, the government’s initial lies about the Romanovs’ fate, the missing bodies and mingled bones that eventually emerged from the grave–all this guaranteed that the Romanovs quickly passed from history into myth.
The occasional rumor that the tsar still lived never was widely believed. But mystery and legend swirled around the hemophiliac crown prince, Alexei, and the princesses–especially Anastasia, the youngest and most vivacious of the daughters, who was 17 when the family was killed.
Did Anastasia survive? Did she flee to the West? Was she Eugenia Smith, a woman who is still alive, at 95, in Newport, R.I., her story believed by virtually no one?
Or was she, as many people believed, Anna Anderson, a strange, persuasive woman whose story inspired the Ingrid Bergman movie “Anastasia” and who died in Virginia in 1984 still claiming to be the missing princess?
The mystery has been solved now and is getting new interest with an irresponsible and sensationalized PBS program on Nova about the Anastasia riddle and, more solidly, with the publication of two books.
“The Romanovs: The Final Chapter,” recounts the story of the murder using documents that have recently come to light. It tells how the bodies were found and exhumed, and recounts the scientific effort to solve the Anastasia dispute. The author is Robert K. Massie, who wrote the earlier best seller, “Nicholas and Alexandra.”
The other is “The Fall of the Romanovs,” by a Yale historian, Mark D. Steinberg, and a Moscow archivist, Vladimir M. Khrustalayev. Using the new documents, especially diaries and letters of the royal family, the authors tell what happened to the Romanovs from March 1917 through 16 months in captivity, first in Tobolsk and later in Yekaterinburg, until the midnight of their massacre.
Tsar Nicholas, who seems to have been a sweet, shallow and feckless man totally unsuited to rule a vast empire in wartime, was overthrown in March of 1917 in the first Russian Revolution, led by Alexander Kerensky. The second revolution, in November, toppled Kerensky and brought to power Vladimir Lenin, whose Bolsheviks killed the royal family.
From the start the Romanovs were an embarrassment and a burden. No foreign royalty wanted them. Nicholas’ cousin, King George of England, reneged on a promise to take the family. Some politicians wanted to exile them, others wanted to put them on trial and many Bolsheviks wanted to kill them.
In this atmosphere, the Romanovs were imprisoned first at Tsarskoe Selo, their estate near St. Petersburg, then moved to the Siberian town of Tobolsk and housed in the governor’s mansion renamed, with a nice Orwellian touch, Freedom House.
Eight months later, amid rumors of rescue attempts, the government moved Nicholas and his family west to the Urals, to Yekaterinburg. The Romanovs spent their last four months in crowded captivity, surrounded by servants and guards, savoring every chance to stroll in the Ipatiev yard.
The Steinberg-Khrustalayev book includes telegrams from the Yekaterinburg Bolsheviks, who wanted to shoot the Romanovs, and the more wary Bolshevik government in Moscow. The post-revolutionary civil war and the approach of the anti-Communist White army toward Yekaterinburg complicated the situation.
The book does not settle the old debate whether Lenin actually ordered the executions: The best evidence, it says, is that Moscow ordered that Nicholas be tried but approved his execution if the war worsened and he couldn’t be evacuated. In fact, the Whites captured Yekaterinburg eight days after the basement massacre.
The most fascinating part of the book, though, is the diaries that Nicholas and Alexandra kept.
Nicholas seemed oddly happy in captivity, sounding at times like a guest in a good hotel.
“An excellent quiet day, warm wonderful weather. . . . The food was excellent, plentiful and served on time.”
He read heavily. Freed from the burdens of empire, he chopped wood, enjoyed the clean country air and made friends with his guards. If he had any doubts about his autocratic rule or his own responsibility for the revolution, his diaries don’t betray it.
Vasily Yakovlev, a commander of the guard through much of the captivity, gave an interview in 1918 confirming this picture of weird contentment.
“He (Nicholas) has grown noticeably healthier in the past year. His hands are calloused, he is cheerful and feels marvelous. It looks as if he’s made peace with his situation. . . . He was most interested in three things: his family, the weather and food. . . . He is apparently completely disinterested in political questions.”
Alexandra was a different matter: “She tried to maintain a proud and reserved manner.”
As her diaries show, Alexandra was a snob and a reactionary, a religious hysteric who called the Russian people “petty dishrags” and scorned the man who eventually led the massacre as “The Ox Commandant.” She called her teenage son “Baby” and railed at her hapless husband to get tough.
“One does not fear you, and one must,” she wrote before the revolution. “Oh, my Boy, make one tremble before you. . . . Crush them all under you–now don’t you laugh, naughty one.”
Alexandra was half-English, half-German, Russian by marriage, and semi-literate in three languages. She and Nicholas usually spoke to one another and their children in English. Tutors sent from Moscow for the children found the whole family deeply ignorant about Russia.
On the night of July 16, as the family was herded into the basement, Alexandra, ever the empress, snapped, “What, there isn’t even a chair?” They brought her a chair, then shot her.
Massie’s book deals largely with what came next–the burial in the forest, the discovery of the graves and, especially, the effort by American, Russian and British scientists to prove whether Anna Anderson was really Anastasia.
The answer is: She wasn’t. Multiple tests were done on DNA taken from relatives of Alexandra, including Prince Philip of Britain, and on tissue of Anderson’s intestine preserved by a Virginia hospital after an operation. There was no match.
The same tests also showed who she was: Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker with a genius for acting and, probably, for self-delusion.
The tests convinced everyone except a few diehards. The Nova producers, obviously disappointed with the truth, tried to spin out the mystery by allowing these diehards–especially Peter Kurth, Anderson’s American biographer –to attack the verdict as “a tragedy of science.”
Massie, also deeply involved in the search for Anastasia, is both more romantic and more balanced about Anderson.
“She was an imposter,” he says. But “she became–in her own mind and the minds of her supporters–a princess. Many real grand dukes and grand duchesses survived the revolution and then lived and died in relative obscurity. Against this backdrop, only one woman will be remembered: Anna Anderson.”
So ends the mystery of Anna Anderson. But what of Anastasia?
Intriguingly, two bodies–Alexei’s and one of the daughters–were missing from the mass grave. Alexei, too ill to walk, could not have survived the massacre.
But which daughter is missing? American researchers believe it’s Anastasia. Russian researchers believe it’s Maria, two years older.
The bones of Alexei and his sister–Anastasia or Maria–probably vanished in the Bolshevik bonfire beside the grave of their family. For most persons who have studied the case, that’s that. The entire family perished in the Ipatiev basement.
And yet . . . Two Russian strangers arrived in 1922 in the Bulgarian village of Gabarevo. One, Georgi Zhudin, was sickly and died eight years later. But the woman, named Eleonora Albertova, born in 1899 (Maria’s birth year), tall and slender, lived on to marry the town doctor, also a Russian, and become a local grande dame.
The news that two bodies were missing from the mass grave has electrified Gabarevo. Archeologists from Sofia arrived, but the graveyard, unfortunately, was bulldozed to build a park and the bones are hopelessly scrambled.
Was Georgi actually the crown prince, Alexei? Was Eleonora actually Anastasia? Or maybe Maria? With the unhappy Romanovs long dead, the legend is free to grow.
