Anastasia and Her Sisters (31 page)

Authors: Carolyn Meyer

BOOK: Anastasia and Her Sisters

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Nicholas died without knowing that the United States had entered the war as an ally of England and France in April 1917. In November 1918 the war ended with the defeat of Austria and Germany. The armistice was signed November 11, four months after the murder of Anastasia and her family.

Not everyone perished. Sydney Gibbes and Baroness Buxhoeveden crossed Siberia to Omsk, which was controlled by the British and the White Army (which opposed the Bolsheviks). The baroness finally reached England safely, and lived the rest of her life there. Gibbes remained in Omsk and worked with the British for a time before they were forced to withdraw to China, where he lived and worked for a while. In the late 1920s he returned to England, and eventually he converted to the Orthodox religion and became a priest. He died in 1963.

Pierre Gilliard stayed in Siberia for three years, married Alexandra Tegleva—Anastasia’s beloved Shura—and eventually managed to leave Russia by way of Japan, then to the United States, and at last to his native Switzerland, where he became a professor of French at the University of Lausanne. He died in 1962.

Prince Felix Yussoupov and his wife, Irina, escaped to Paris.

Anya Vyrubova, who was taken from Tsarskoe Selo with Lili Dehn, was first imprisoned in the Fortress of Peter and Paul for five months, then released, and then imprisoned repeatedly, until in 1920 she escaped from Petrograd and fled to Finland, where she died in 1964. Lili Dehn, who was briefly imprisoned with Anya, was released and placed under house arrest to care for her son, Titi. Later she and her mother and
Titi escaped on a ship bound for Greece, eventually reaching England, where she was reunited with her husband.

Anastasia’s Grandmère Marie could not keep her promise to celebrate her granddaughter’s sixteenth birthday in Paris. The dowager empress, who last saw her son Nicholas at the time of his abdication, fled to Crimea with other Romanov family members. She occasionally received word of the family’s ordeal and their imprisonment in Ekaterinburg. Her sister, Dowager Queen Alexandra, mother of King George V, persuaded Dowager Empress Marie to accept the king’s offer to send a ship to take her to safety in England. She chose to return to Denmark, where she’d been born, and died there in 1928 at the age of eighty. She never accepted the terrible story of the murder of her son and his family.

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Nicholas’s sister, who had finally found happiness in her marriage to Nikolai Kulikovsky, somehow survived the Revolution in Crimea. Olga and her husband were taken there by train with her mother, Dowager Empress Marie, and her sister, Grand Duchess Xenia, and Xenia’s husband, Sandro. They lived under house arrest at Sandro’s estate. Olga’s son Tikhon was born there while the family was under a death sentence from the local revolutionary council; another son, Guri, was born two years later, after the family had managed to escape and gone to join Dowager Empress Marie in Denmark. There they lived, not entirely happily, with Olga’s domineering mother. After her mother’s death, Olga and her family moved to a farm. After World War II ended, they emigrated to Canada, where they farmed until they were too elderly to continue. Olga lived out her final years in
a simple apartment in Toronto; she died in 1960. Throughout her long life Olga continued to earn money from her paintings.

And then there were the children of Dr. Botkin, Tatiana and Gleb. When their father chose to accompany the Romanovs from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg, Rodionov told Tatiana and Gleb that they could go with the others as far as Ekaterinburg but he would not grant them an entry permit and they would be arrested. They made the decision to stay in Tobolsk. When they learned of the murder of their father along with the tsar and his family, Gleb and his sister fled from Tobolsk. That fall, Tatiana married a Ukrainian officer whom she had known at Tsarskoe Selo and who had become involved with an anarchist movement. She and her husband escaped through Vladivostok and made their way to France. Tatiana’s son, Konstantin Melnik-Botkin, attended the funeral service for Anastasia and her family at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in 1998.

After fleeing from Tobolsk, Gleb initially found refuge in a Russian Orthodox monastery. He once again considered becoming a priest but ultimately rejected that idea. He met and married Nadine Mandraji, daughter of a Russian nobleman and widow of an officer killed in battle in 1915. Like his sister, Gleb and his wife and her three-year-old daughter escaped through Vladivostok. Then their paths diverged: Gleb went to Japan and finally to the United States, where he worked as an illustrator.

A common theme that runs through many of these survivors’ stories is the possibility that of all those cruelly murdered on the seventeenth of July, there was one who somehow managed to escape: Anastasia. In 1922, the story of a young
woman claiming to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna began to circulate and capture the imagination of the public.

A woman calling herself Anna Tschaikovsky turned up in a psychiatric hospital in Germany, claiming to be Anastasia. One of the first of the survivors of the Bolshevik revolution to visit Anna was Baroness Buxhoeveden, who declared there was no resemblance. Eventually Pierre Gilliard and his wife, Shura, came to visit, and they too were quite firm in their assertion that this was definitely not Anastasia. Anastasia’s aunt, Olga Alexandrovna, denied that the woman could be her niece. The tsarina’s brother, Ernst, Grand Duke of Hesse, hired a private detective and reported that the woman was actually a Polish worker named Franziska Schanzkowska. Even Prince Yussoupov, who had participated in the murder of Rasputin, and his wife, Princess Irina, Anastasia’s cousin, denied any possibility. So did Charles Sydney Gibbes, Anastasia’s English tutor. When Dowager Empress Marie died in October 1928, a dozen Romanov relatives gathered at the funeral in Copenhagen and signed a document attesting that Anna was an impostor.

But not everyone was so sure. Lili Dehn thought this was the real Anastasia. Tatiana Botkina-Melnik thought she saw a resemblance. Her brother, Gleb, was sure of it: This was truly Anastasia.

Ten years after the murders, Gleb hired a lawyer to investigate Anna’s claim that the tsar had secretly hidden a large fortune in England. That turned out to be false, but it didn’t change Gleb’s mind about Anna. For a year or so Anna lived as the guest of a wealthy woman in New York, but when her mental condition began to deteriorate in 1932, Anna went back to
Germany. She lived on the grounds of a mental hospital for some time.

The years passed. In 1939, Germany, under the leadership of Hitler, invaded Poland, France declared war on Germany, and World War II began. Kaiser Wilhelm—Cousin Willy—died in the Netherlands in 1941 after two decades in exile, and six months later, Germany declared war on the United States. World War II devastated Europe, just as World War I had.

Meanwhile, Gleb Botkin still believed Anna’s claim. This was surely his dear friend. In 1968—had she lived, Anastasia would have been sixty-seven—Gleb and a wealthy and eccentric friend, Jack Manahan, a history professor in Virginia, paid for Anna’s passage to return to the United States. Just before her visitor’s visa was to expire at the end of six months, Anna and Jack Manahan were married, with Gleb as their best man. Manahan was twenty years younger; it was strictly a marriage of convenience. A year later Gleb died. A few more years passed. Anastasia Manahan, as she was then legally known, was in poor health and mentally unstable, and she was again put in a mental hospital. That was in 1983. She had been in and out of mental hospitals for more than sixty years. A few months later she died of pneumonia.

DNA testing has demonstrated that Anna was not related to the Romanovs but to the Polish family Schanzkowska. Grand Duke Ernst’s private detective had been right. One can’t help wondering whether Gleb ever had the slightest suspicion that this woman was not the lovely young woman to whom he had once lost his heart, “now and always.”

SUGGESTED READING

Many books make good reading about the Romanovs, as well as about Russia in the early twentieth century, the outbreak of World War I, and the rise of communism, and the terrible end of Anastasia and her family. Among my favorites are
Nicholas and Alexandra
, by Robert K. Massie (New York: Atheneum, 1967), written nearly a half century ago, and the much more recent
Alix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina
, by Virginia Rounding (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012). Both are clear, informative, and engaging. I desperately wish
The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra
, by Helen Rappaport (New York: Macmillan, 2014), had been available when I was working on my own book.

The most beautiful book is surely Peter Kurth’s
Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), with gorgeous photographs by Peter Christopher. On a smaller scale,
Anastasia’s Album
, by Hugh Brewster (New York: Scholastic, 1997), features many candid Romanov family photographs with an emphasis, of course, on Anastasia.

A charming book written by Anastasia’s friend, Gleb Botkin, and illustrated with his paintings,
Lost Tales: Stories for the Tsar’s Children
(New York: Villard, 1996), is more difficult to find but worth the search. I especially like the inclusion of a photograph of Gleb, handsome and soulful, taken in 1917.

Naturally, multitudes of websites exist relating to the
Romanovs, but one stands far above the rest: the Alexander Palace Time Machine, accessible at
www.alexanderpalace.org/palace
. There you’ll find four principal categories to explore: palace archives, personalities (with eyewitness accounts), resources, and palace tour, each offering many fascinating subcategories.

I’ll also mention one more book:
Anastasia: The Last Grand Duchess, Russia, 1914
(New York: Scholastic, 2013), part of the Royal Diaries series; I wrote it fifteen years ago with younger readers in mind, and it was recently reissued in paperback. In 2012, I began to write
Anastasia and Her Sisters
in order to explore in greater depth the emotional life of Anastasia, including her relationships with her older sisters and younger brother and with Gleb Botkin.

CAROLYN MEYER’S
beloved and award-winning historic novels have been called “absorbing” by
Kirkus Reviews,
“lush and detail rich” by
Publishers Weekly,
and “informative” by
School Library Journal.
In her unique first-person telling, Carolyn Meyer “will engage readers looking for a personal connection or proof that history’s largest figures were once just like them,” said
Booklist.
The acclaimed author of more than fifty books for young people, Carolyn Meyer lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Visit her at
READCAROLYN.com
.