In the early hours of July 17, 1918, gunshots rang out in the basement of the Ipachev Luxury Villa, where the former Tsar Nicholas II and his family were imprisoned. Thirty minutes later, a truck rumbled out of its gates and disappeared into the dark Siberian night, where no one had seen the Tsar's family again. But because no one had ever seen the remains of the Tsar's family, many had been speculating that one or more of the members might have escaped.
Nearly two years later, on a cold night in February 1920, a young woman was rescued in the canals of Berlin. She was covered in bruises: her jaw had been broken, her teeth were loose, and doctors said a bullet had grazed her head. Because she refused to name herself, the authorities had to send her to a mental hospital, where she remained silent. Doctors and nurses could prove she was in good spirits, but she said nothing about the past. It wasn't until 1922 that she suddenly announced that she was Anastasia, the daughter of Nicholas II, the princess who should have been dead, and was miraculously rescued by well-meaning soldiers during the execution and secretly sent out of Russia, which surprised everyone.
Grand Duke Anastasia was the fourth daughter of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra
The news spread like wildfire in Russian immigrant communities, and exiled nobles came to visit her by the bedside and argue about her appearance and ability to speak Russian. How do you confirm her identity? In the summer of 1925, Nicholas II's sister, Archduke Olga, asked Pierre Gilliar, Anastasia's former supervisor, to visit, and although Gilliar could not find that the woman had any resemblance to Anastasia, he did not want to be the last to make the decision, so in the autumn of the same year Anastasia's godmother Olga came to Berlin, and she was also one of the very few who visited Nikolai and Alexandra frequently, so she was the most qualified to make a judgment.
The site of the execution of the Tsar, the basement of villa Ipachev
But the ensuing reversal was a shock. There was no confirmed evidence of the identity of the "princess", and the camp of supporters and opponents began to emerge. Those who supported the woman, Anastasia, firmly believed that Olga and Gilliar had confirmed her identity, and after visiting the Grand Duchess, she wrote to the woman, who called herself "Anastasia Tchaikovsky", telling her: "You are not alone, and we will not abandon you." But Olga, in private, confided that she had not found her niece in Berlin, writing conclusively: "This is a complete fabrication, and many people who have never met the real Anastasia are convinced of it."
Two of the strongest supporters of Anastasia Tchaikovsky were Gleb Botkin and Botkin's sister Tatyana, whose father had been executed in Yekaterinburg along with the Tsar's entire family, and who were convinced that the young woman was Anastasia, though they admitted that her appearance had changed somewhat. In 1928 Botkin became her protector and arranged for her to travel to New York to visit Anastasia's cousin, the Russian princess Zinya. The woman's arrogant demeanor, blue eyes, and "intuitively seemingly family" impressed Zinia, but after a few months she finally found that the person was not easy to get along with, and "Anastasia Tchaikovsky" moved to the home of a high-society lady in New York. It was difficult to understand the woman's eccentric behavior and her over-consumption lifestyle, and eventually she was dragged into a shelter in hysteria, and then she returned to Germany.
Anastasia dressed in traditional Russian court costume in 1910
After the death of Nicholas II's mother in 1928, 12 relatives of the Tsar's family publicly denounced "Anastasia Tchaikovsky" as a liar. Ten years later, she filed a lawsuit in court under the name "Anna Anderson", challenging the distribution of a sum of property of the Tsar. The property, which was held in a bank in Berlin, was frozen at the beginning of world war I, and in 1933 the money, whose value had been greatly diminished, was divided up by nicholas II's surviving relatives. The lawsuit dragged on and off from 1938 to 1970, becoming the longest-running case in German history, with Lord Mountbatten, the real Anastasia's first cousin, paying legal fees for The Relatives of Empress Alexandra in Hesse's hometown. Most of the time, trials have become a battleground for bitter accusations and infatuations by witnesses on both sides. The prosecution lawyers brought in anthropologists and handwriting experts to prove that Anderson was a grand duke, and the defense countered tit-for-tat. Anderson herself, however, always refused to work with lawyers, saying, "It doesn't matter if you believe it or not." This attitude only increases the credibility of her identity, after all, what kind of scammer would be so chattering and refusing to cooperate?
In the mid-1950s, Anderson lived in obscurity in the Black Forest region of Germany. In 1956, the film Anastasia, based on Anderson's story, was released, for which actress Ingrid Bergman won an Academy Award, and many tourists would take a car to Anderson's hut, climb over the fence and shout for her to come out. Magazines and newspapers around the world painted a huge picture of the legend of the missing princess, a modern fairy tale that led to tragedy, and she was famous; somehow anastasia was more or less believed to be a survivor of the Tsar's family. When the final verdict was announced in 1970, no one was satisfied, Anderson could not prove that she was Anastasia, and the Federal German Supreme Court said there was no conclusive evidence that the real Grand Duchess died in 1918.
An article in a French newspaper describing the execution of a Tsar's family in July 1926
By this time, Anderson had left Germany altogether. In 1968, Greib Botkin took her to the United States again and introduced her to jack Manahan, a wealthy professor of history. Anderson loves the United States, especially the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, where Botkin and Manahan live. On December 23, 1968, she married Manahan, with Botkin as the best man, and the professor proudly described himself as "the tsar's pony."
The eccentric Manahan became a celebrity in Charlottesville at one point. The diminutive "Grand Duchess" often visits a luxurious country club, wearing plaid pants, a plastic red raincoat, and a yellow hat, she does not observe table manners, and she and her husband argue loudly in a series of broken English and German, which makes the people around her very dissatisfied. After that, the couple gradually stayed out of the house, and the area around their once-delicate-looking house became a pile of garbage, full of rotten vegetables, and a group of cats, cats, dogs and dogs.
She died of pneumonia on 12 February 1984 at the age of 82 (according to her), and many people remember her through the news of her death.
So was she the daughter of the deceased Tsar, Anastasia?
(Source: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Empire)