Anastasia (16 page)

Designed by Peter Carl Fabergé, the imperial Easter egg of 1915, made of white enamel with a red cross, honors the Romanov women who became war nurses. Their photographs, shown here, fit inside the egg. Pictured left to right: the tsar’s sister Olga, his daughters Olga and Tatiana, Tsaritsa Alexandra, and the tsar’s first cousin Marie Pavlovna.

Alexei with his spaniel, Joy, on a visit to the imperial army in the field, photographed 1917.

Tsar Nicholas II and Alexei at the front in 1916.

The tsar, the tsaritsa, and their children working in the garden while imprisoned at Tsarskoe Selo.

Tsar Nicholas under guard by Russian soldiers at Tsarskoe Selo, photographed August 19, 1917.

Prisoners in exile. Anastasia, with her father, sisters, and brother, sits on the roof of their prison house in Tobolsk, Siberia.

Ipatiev House, “the House of Special Purpose,” in Sverdlovsk (formerly Ekaterinburg) where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed on July 17, 1918.

Russian president Boris Yeltsin and wife before the tomb with the remains of Tsar Nicholas II at the burial ceremony in the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul, July 1998.

Russian is a Slavic language spoken today by over 150 million people. The Russian alphabet, called the Cyrillic alphabet, has thirty-three letters based largely on the Greek alphabet. When Russian is translated into English, letters from the Roman alphabet are substituted for the sound of the Cyrillic letters, and not all translators make the same substitutions. This is why
tsar
is sometimes written as
czar
. Names also appear with different spellings:
Alexei
is sometimes written as
Aleksey
, and
Anya
as
Annia
.

In the Romanovs’ time, Russians properly addressed one another by their first, or given name, followed by the patronymic, the name of their father, with a feminine or masculine ending added. That’s why Anastasia was properly called
Anastasia Nicholaievna
(
Anastasia
, daughter of
Nicholas
), and her brother was
Alexei Nicholaievitch
(
Alexei
, son of
Nicholas
).

The calendar used in Anastasia’s time, called the Julian calendar, was significantly different from the Gregorian calendar that was in use in most other parts of the world. The Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar, had been in use for more than 1,500 years. The Julian year was 365 days and 6 hours — 11 minutes and 14 seconds longer than the time Earth actually takes to revolve around the sun. Over the years those minutes and seconds added up, so by a.d. 1580 the vernal (spring) equinox was actually occurring ten days later than the date shown on the calendar.

Taking the advice of astronomers, Pope Gregory XIII corrected the difference by dropping ten days and making some adjustments to the leap year with its additional day in February. In 1582, the Pope’s Gregorian calendar was adopted by most Roman Catholic countries in Europe. German states kept the old calendar until 1700, and Great Britain and the American colonies did not change until 1752. Russia and Turkey were the last to accept the new calendar, in 1918.

During Anastasia’s time, the difference between the old Julian calendar and the new Gregorian calendar had increased to thirteen days. Her parents and many other educated Russians sometimes used both systems, perhaps dating a letter written to a relative in England “23 October/5 November,” meaning that the letter was being written according to the “Old Style” Russian calendar on October 23, but that on the Englishman’s calendar the date was November 5.

The calendar of Christian feast and fast days was also affected. Christmas was celebrated on December 25 according to the Russian calendar, but that date was thirteen days later than Christmas in Germany, France, and the United States, where it was already January 7 of the following year. Easter is more complicated, because the date changes every year according to ancient formulas. But the Russian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church use a formula that is different from the formula used by Western Christian churches. As a result, the Russian Orthodox date of Easter and other holy days related to it can vary as much as a few weeks from the date observed in the rest of the world.