Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia (Russian: Анастасия Николаевна; June 18, 1901 – July 17, 1918) was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last ruler of Imperial Russia, and his wife, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna.
Anastasia was the younger sister of Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, and Maria (often called the OTMA sisters) and the older sister of Alexei Nikolaevich, the Tsarevich of Russia. She was killed with her family by a group of Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg on July 17, 1918.
After her death, many people claimed she had escaped, partly because her burial place was unknown during communist rule. In 1991, a mine near Yekaterinburg was found to contain the remains of the Tsar, his wife, and three of their daughters. These remains had been treated with acid and were moved to Peter and Paul Fortress in 1998. In 2007, the bodies of Alexei and one of the remaining daughters—either Anastasia or her older sister Maria—were discovered. Scientific tests, including DNA analysis, confirmed that the remains belong to the Romanov family, proving Anastasia was killed with her family.
Several women falsely claimed to be Anastasia. The most well-known was Anna Anderson. After Anderson died in 1984, DNA testing in 1994 on her tissue and hair showed she was not related to the Romanov family.
Biography
Anastasia was born on 18 June 1901. She was the fourth daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra. When she was born, her parents and family were disappointed because she was a girl. They had hoped for a son who would become the next in line to be king. Her father took a long walk to calm himself before visiting his wife and newborn daughter for the first time. Her paternal aunt, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia, said, "My God! What a disappointment!… a fourth girl!" Her first cousin twice removed, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, wrote, "Forgive us, Lord, if we all felt disappointment instead of joy. We were so hoping for a boy, and it's a daughter." The travel writer Burton Holmes wrote, "Nicholas would part with half his Empire in exchange for one Imperial boy."
Anastasia was named after the fourth-century martyr St. Anastasia. "Anastasia" is a Greek name (Αναστασία), meaning "of the resurrection," a fact often mentioned in stories about her rumored survival. Anastasia's title is most accurately translated as "Grand Princess." "Grand Duchess" became the most widely used translation of the title in English from Russian.
The Tsar's children were raised simply. They slept on hard camp cots without pillows, except when they were sick, took cold baths in the morning, and were expected to tidy their rooms and do needlework to sell at charity events. Most in the household, including servants, called the Grand Duchess by her first name and patronym, "Anastasia Nikolaevna," and did not use her title or style. She was sometimes called by the French version of her name, "Anastasie," or by the Russian nicknames "Nastasya," "Nastya," "Nastas," or "Nastenka." Other family nicknames for Anastasia were "Malenkaya," meaning "little (one)" in Russian, or "Shvybzik," meaning "merry little one" or "little mischief" in German.
Anastasia and her older sister Maria were known in the family as "The Little Pair." The two girls shared a room, often wore similar dresses, and spent much time together. Their older sisters, Olga and Tatiana, also shared a room and were called "The Big Pair." The four girls sometimes signed letters using the nickname OTMA, which came from the first letters of their first names.
DNA testing on the remains of the imperial family proved in 2009 that Anastasia's younger brother, Alexei, had Hemophilia B, a rare form of the disease. His mother and one sister, identified as Maria or Anastasia, were carriers. Symptomatic carriers of the gene, while not hemophiliacs themselves, can have symptoms of hemophilia, including lower blood-clotting factors that can cause heavy bleeding. If Anastasia had lived to have children, it would have been likely they would have been affected by the disease.
Anastasia was short and tended to be chubby, with blue eyes and blonde hair. Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, her mother's lady-in-waiting, noted that "her features were regular and finely cut. She had fair hair, fine eyes, with impish laughter in their depths, and dark eyebrows that nearly met." Buxhoeveden believed Anastasia resembled her mother, saying she "was more like her mother's than her father's family. She was rather short even at seventeen, and was, then decidedly fat, but it was the fatness of youth. She would have outgrown it, as had her sister Marie."
Anastasia was a lively and energetic child. Margaretta Eagar, a governess to the four grand duchesses, said one person commented that the toddler Anastasia had the greatest personal charm of any child she had ever seen.
While often described as bright and gifted, she was not interested in the strict rules of the classroom, according to her tutors Pierre Gilliard and Sydney Gibbes. Gibbes, Gilliard, and ladies-in-waiting Lili Dehn and Anna Vyrubova described Anastasia as lively, mischievous, and a talented actress. Her sharp, witty remarks sometimes upset others. However, she was also very amusing: "Even as a baby she had entertained grave old men, who were her neighbors at table, with her astonishing remarks."
Anastasia's daring sometimes went beyond acceptable behavior. "She undoubtedly held the record for punishable deeds in her family, for in naughtiness she was a true genius," said Gleb Botkin, son of the court physician Yevgeny Botkin, who later died with the family at Yekaterinburg. Anastasia sometimes tripped servants and played pranks on her tutors. As a child, she would climb trees and refuse to come down. Once, during a snowball fight at the family's Polish estate, Anastasia rolled a rock into a snowball and threw it at her older sister Tatiana, knocking her to the ground. When she was a child, her father had to save her from drowning while they were at Livadia in the Crimea. A distant cousin, Princess Nina Georgievna, recalled that "Anastasia was nasty to the point of being evil," and would cheat, kick, and scratch her playmates during games; she was upset because the younger Nina was taller than she was. She cared less about her appearance than her sisters. Hallie Erminie Rives, a best-selling American author and wife of an American diplomat, described how 10-year-old Anastasia ate chocolates without removing her long, white opera gloves at the St. Petersburg opera house.
Despite her energy, Anastasia's physical health was sometimes poor. The Grand Duchess suffered from painful bunions, which affected both of her big toes. Anastasia had a weak muscle in her back and was prescribed a massage twice per week. She hid under the bed or in a cupboard to avoid the massage. Anastasia's older sister, Maria, reportedly bled heavily in December 1914 during an operation to remove her tonsils, according to her paternal aunt, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia, who was interviewed later in her life. The doctor performing the operation was so unnerved that he had to be ordered to continue by Maria's mother. Olga Alexandrovna said she believed all four of her nieces bled more than was normal and believed they were carriers of the hemophilia gene, like their mother.
Her mother relied on the advice of Grigori Rasputin, a Russian peasant and wandering "holy man," and credited his prayers with saving the ailing Tsarevich on many occasions. Anastasia
False reports of survival
Anastasia's possible escape and survival became one of the most famous historical mysteries of the 20th century, leading to many books and movies. At least ten women claimed to be Anastasia, each giving different stories about how she survived. Anna Anderson, the most well-known claimant, first appeared in public between 1920 and 1922. She said she had pretended to die among her family and servants and escaped with the help of a kind guard who noticed she was still alive. Her legal battle to prove she was Anastasia lasted from 1938 to 1970 and was the longest legal case ever heard by German courts. The court ruled that Anderson did not provide enough proof to be recognized as the grand duchess.
Anderson died in 1984, and her body was cremated. In 1994, DNA tests were done on a tissue sample from Anderson and the blood of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who was a great-nephew of Empress Alexandra. The tests showed that if the sample was from Anderson, she was not related to Tsar Nicholas or Tsarina Alexandra. Anderson’s mitochondrial DNA matched that of a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska, a missing Polish factory worker. Some supporters of Anderson’s claim admitted that the DNA tests proved she was not Anastasia.
Other claimants included Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilyeva and Eugenia Smith. Two young women who said they were Anastasia and her sister Maria were taken in by a priest in the Ural Mountains in 1919. They lived as nuns until their deaths in 1964 and were buried under the names Anastasia and Maria Nikolaevna.
Stories about Anastasia’s survival were spread by reports of Bolshevik soldiers and secret police searching for "Anastasia Romanov" in trains and homes. In 1918, when Anastasia was briefly imprisoned at Perm, Princess Helena Petrovna, the wife of Anastasia’s distant cousin, said a guard brought a girl who claimed to be Anastasia to her cell. Helena did not recognize the girl, and the guard took her away. Other witnesses later said they saw Anastasia and her family in Perm, but this story is now considered false. Rumors of their survival were spread to hide the fact that the family had been killed. A few days after their deaths, the German government sent telegrams to Russia demanding "the safety of the princesses of German blood." Russia wanted to avoid angering Germany, so it lied and said the women had been moved to a safer place.
In September 1918, eight witnesses reported seeing a young woman after an escape attempt at a railway station near Perm. These witnesses included Maxim Grigoyev, Tatiana Sitnikova and her son Fyodor, Ivan and Matrina Kuklin, Vassily Ryabov, Ustinya Varankina, and Dr. Pavel Utkin, who treated the girl. Some witnesses identified the girl as Anastasia when shown photos of the grand duchess by White Russian Army investigators. Utkin said the girl told him, "I am the daughter of the ruler, Anastasia." Utkin also obtained a prescription for a patient named "N" at the request of the secret police. White Army investigators later found records of the prescription. Around the same time, several young people in Russia claimed to be Romanov escapees. Boris Soloviev, the husband of Rasputin’s daughter, tricked Russian families by asking for money to help a Romanov impostor escape to China. He also found young women willing to pretend to be grand duchesses to help him deceive families.
Some biographers suggested that guards might have had the chance to save a survivor. Yakov Yurovsky ordered guards to return stolen items after the murders. At one point, the bodies of the victims were left unattended in a truck, basement, and corridor. Some guards who had not participated in the murders and had sympathy for the grand duchesses were reportedly left in the basement with the bodies.
Romanov graves and DNA proof
In 1991, the burial site of the imperial family and their servants was found in the woods outside Yekaterinburg. The grave had been discovered nearly a decade earlier but was kept hidden by its discoverers from the Communists ruling Russia at the time. The grave contained nine of the expected eleven sets of remains. DNA and skeletal analysis matched these remains to Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of the four grand duchesses (Olga, Tatiana, and likely Maria). The other remains, with unrelated DNA, belonged to the family's doctor (Yevgeny Botkin), their valet (Alexei Trupp), their cook (Ivan Kharitonov), and Alexandra's maid (Anna Demidova). Forensic expert William R. Maples found that the bodies of Tsarevitch Alexei and Anastasia were missing from the family's grave. Russian scientists disagreed, saying the missing body was Maria's. Russian scientists identified the body as Anastasia by comparing photos of the youngest grand duchess with the skulls of the victims from the mass grave. They estimated the height and width of the skulls where bones were missing. American scientists said this method was not precise.
American scientists believed the missing body was Anastasia because none of the female skeletons showed signs of being young, such as an underdeveloped collarbone, unerupted wisdom teeth, or immature vertebrae in the back, which would be expected in a seventeen-year-old. In 1998, when the remains of the imperial family were finally buried, a body about 170 centimeters (5 ft 7 in) tall was placed under Anastasia's name. Photographs taken of her standing beside her three sisters six months before the murders showed Anastasia was several inches shorter than them. Her mother wrote in a letter from December 15, 1917, seven months before the murders, that Anastasia was short and round, with short legs. Scientists believed it was unlikely she could have grown significantly in the last months of her life. Her actual height was about 157 centimeters (5 ft 2 in).
The "Yurovsky Note" described that two bodies were removed from the main grave and cremated in a secret location to hide the burials of the Tsar and his retinue if the remains were discovered by the Whites. Later searches failed to find the cremation site or the remains of the two missing Romanov children.
On August 23, 2007, a Russian archaeologist announced the discovery of two burned, partial skeletons near Yekaterinburg that matched the site described in Yurovsky's memoirs. The archaeologists said the bones were from a boy aged 12 to 15 and a young woman aged 15 to 19. Anastasia was 17 years and one month old at the time of the assassination, while her sister Maria was 19 years and one month old, and her brother Alexei was two weeks short of his 14th birthday. Anastasia's older sisters, Olga and Tatiana, were 22 and 21 years old, respectively, at the time of the assassination. Along with the remains, archaeologists found pieces of a container holding sulfuric acid, nails, metal strips from a wooden box, and bullets of different sizes. The site was found using metal detectors and metal rods as tools.
DNA testing by multiple international laboratories, including the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and Innsbruck Medical University, confirmed the remains belonged to Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters, proving conclusively that all family members, including Anastasia, died in 1918. The parents and all five children are now accounted for, each with a unique DNA profile. While the tests confirmed all Romanov bodies have been found, one study could not determine which body from the two graves belonged to Maria and which belonged to Anastasia. A well-publicized debate over which daughter, Maria (according to Russian experts) or Anastasia (according to US experts), was recovered from the second grave could not be resolved based on the DNA results. Without a DNA reference from each sister, only Alexei—the only son of Nicholas and Alexandra—could be conclusively identified.
Sainthood
In the year 2000, Anastasia and her family were declared saints by the Russian Orthodox Church for their suffering and faith. Earlier, in 1981, the same family was recognized as holy martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. The remains of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were finally buried in the St. Catherine Chapel at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on July 17, 1998, eighty years after they were killed. As of 2018, the bones of Alexei and Maria (or possibly Anastasia) were still kept by the Orthodox Church.
Depictions in art, media, and literature
The idea that Anastasia survived has been shown in many movies and plays. These include the 1997 animated film and the 1956 movie with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, which inspired the animated film. There is also a Broadway musical based on the 1997 movie. The earliest version, made in 1928, was called Clothes Make the Woman. The story follows a woman who pretends to be Anastasia for a Hollywood film. She is later recognized by the Russian soldier who originally saved her from people who tried to harm her.